@inproceedings{raiyan-etal-2026-frugalprompt,
title = "{F}rugal{P}rompt: Reducing Contextual Overhead in Large Language Models via Token Attribution",
author = "Raiyan, Syed Rifat and
Ishmam, Md Farhan and
Al Imran, Abdullah and
Moni, Mohammad Ali",
editor = "Sousa-Silva, Rui and
Lopes Cardoso, Henrique and
Koponen, Maarit and
Pareja-Lora, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era ({LUHME} 2026)",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.20/",
pages = "256--271",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-471-2",
abstract = "Human communication heavily relies on laconism and inferential pragmatics, allowing listeners to successfully reconstruct rich meaning from sparse, telegraphic speech. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) owe much of their stellar performance to expansive input contexts, yet such verbosity inflates monetary costs, carbon footprint, and inference-time latency. This overhead manifests from the redundant low-utility tokens present in typical prompts, as only a fraction of tokens typically carries the majority of the semantic weight. Inspired by the aforementioned cognitive psycholinguistic processes, we address this inefficiency by introducing FrugalPrompt, a novel prompt compression framework for LLMs, which retains only the most semantically significant tokens. Leveraging two state-of-the-art token attribution methods, GlobEnc and DecompX, we assign salience scores to every token in an input sequence, rank them to retain the top-k{\%} tokens, and obtain a sparse frugalized prompt. We establish the theoretical stability of our approach and provide strong empirical results across a suite of four NLP tasks to study the trade-off between the portion of retained tokens and performance. Experimental findings across retention settings reveal asymmetric performance patterns that suggest potential task contamination effects. We posit that our work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of LLM behavior in performance-efficiency trade-offs and delineates the boundary between tasks tolerant of contextual sparsity and those requiring exhaustive context."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="raiyan-etal-2026-frugalprompt">
<titleInfo>
<title>FrugalPrompt: Reducing Contextual Overhead in Large Language Models via Token Attribution</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Syed</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Rifat</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Raiyan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Md</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Farhan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ishmam</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Abdullah</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Al Imran</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mohammad</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Ali</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moni</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era (LUHME 2026)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Rui</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Sousa-Silva</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Henrique</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lopes Cardoso</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maarit</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Koponen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Antonio</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pareja-Lora</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-471-2</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Human communication heavily relies on laconism and inferential pragmatics, allowing listeners to successfully reconstruct rich meaning from sparse, telegraphic speech. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) owe much of their stellar performance to expansive input contexts, yet such verbosity inflates monetary costs, carbon footprint, and inference-time latency. This overhead manifests from the redundant low-utility tokens present in typical prompts, as only a fraction of tokens typically carries the majority of the semantic weight. Inspired by the aforementioned cognitive psycholinguistic processes, we address this inefficiency by introducing FrugalPrompt, a novel prompt compression framework for LLMs, which retains only the most semantically significant tokens. Leveraging two state-of-the-art token attribution methods, GlobEnc and DecompX, we assign salience scores to every token in an input sequence, rank them to retain the top-k% tokens, and obtain a sparse frugalized prompt. We establish the theoretical stability of our approach and provide strong empirical results across a suite of four NLP tasks to study the trade-off between the portion of retained tokens and performance. Experimental findings across retention settings reveal asymmetric performance patterns that suggest potential task contamination effects. We posit that our work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of LLM behavior in performance-efficiency trade-offs and delineates the boundary between tasks tolerant of contextual sparsity and those requiring exhaustive context.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">raiyan-etal-2026-frugalprompt</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.20/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>256</start>
<end>271</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T FrugalPrompt: Reducing Contextual Overhead in Large Language Models via Token Attribution
%A Raiyan, Syed Rifat
%A Ishmam, Md Farhan
%A Al Imran, Abdullah
%A Moni, Mohammad Ali
%Y Sousa-Silva, Rui
%Y Lopes Cardoso, Henrique
%Y Koponen, Maarit
%Y Pareja-Lora, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era (LUHME 2026)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-471-2
%F raiyan-etal-2026-frugalprompt
%X Human communication heavily relies on laconism and inferential pragmatics, allowing listeners to successfully reconstruct rich meaning from sparse, telegraphic speech. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) owe much of their stellar performance to expansive input contexts, yet such verbosity inflates monetary costs, carbon footprint, and inference-time latency. This overhead manifests from the redundant low-utility tokens present in typical prompts, as only a fraction of tokens typically carries the majority of the semantic weight. Inspired by the aforementioned cognitive psycholinguistic processes, we address this inefficiency by introducing FrugalPrompt, a novel prompt compression framework for LLMs, which retains only the most semantically significant tokens. Leveraging two state-of-the-art token attribution methods, GlobEnc and DecompX, we assign salience scores to every token in an input sequence, rank them to retain the top-k% tokens, and obtain a sparse frugalized prompt. We establish the theoretical stability of our approach and provide strong empirical results across a suite of four NLP tasks to study the trade-off between the portion of retained tokens and performance. Experimental findings across retention settings reveal asymmetric performance patterns that suggest potential task contamination effects. We posit that our work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of LLM behavior in performance-efficiency trade-offs and delineates the boundary between tasks tolerant of contextual sparsity and those requiring exhaustive context.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.20/
%P 256-271
Markdown (Informal)
[FrugalPrompt: Reducing Contextual Overhead in Large Language Models via Token Attribution](https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.20/) (Raiyan et al., LUHME 2026)
ACL