Comment by FartyMcFarter
8 hours ago
Isn't transformer attention quadratic in complexity in terms of context size? In order to achieve 1M token context I think these models have to be employing a lot of shortcuts.
I'm not an expert but maybe this explains context rot.
Nope, there’s no tricks unless there’s been major architectural shifts I missed. The rot doesn’t come from inference tricks to try to bring down quadratic complexity of the KV cache. Task performance problems are generally a training problem - the longer and larger the data set, the fewer examples you have to train on it. So how do you train the model to behave well - that’s where the tricks are. I believe most of it relies on synthetically generated data if I’m not mistaken, which explains the rot.