Diagnosing Long-Range Failures in a Segment-Processed LLM with Dual Memory
You are deploying an internal LLM assistant that must answer questions about a 200-page policy manual. To control inference cost, the model processes the manual in sequential segments (e.g., 512 tokens at a time) and maintains memory across segments. The attention KV cache at any point is formed by concatenating two fixed-size components: (1) a sliding-window local memory that keeps only the most recent tokens in high fidelity, and (2) a compressed memory that stores a compressed representation of older evicted content. In production, you observe a specific failure mode: the assistant answers correctly when the needed evidence is within the last ~1–2 segments, but it often misses or distorts details that appear earlier in the document, even though those details were present and should have been archived.
Write an evaluation memo that (a) explains, using the idea of “memory as a context encoder,” how the interaction between sliding-window local attention, segment-based recurrent updates, and compression can cause this failure mode, and (b) proposes two concrete design changes (not just “increase memory”) that would improve long-range factual recall while keeping memory usage bounded. For each proposed change, justify the expected impact and the trade-off it introduces (e.g., compute, latency, or risk of information loss).
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Ch.2 Generative Models - Foundations of Large Language Models
Foundations of Large Language Models
Foundations of Large Language Models Course
Computing Sciences
Ch.4 Alignment - Foundations of Large Language Models
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