context

Definition

The span of input a model can attend to in a single forward pass, measured in tokens. Anything outside it effectively does not exist for the model, which is why fitting long documents, chat history, and retrieved passages into the window is a central engineering problem. The key distinction is against parametric knowledge: context is supplied fresh at inference time and disappears afterwards, whereas weights carry what was learned during training.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough — The Missing Temporal Link: Putting Script Timing on the Video–Audio Axis with Temporal Context RoutingThe Missing Temporal Link: Temporal Context Routing for Script-Driven Audio-Video Generation
• Paper Explained — LatentPress: Feeding Compressed Context Straight to a Frozen LLM, Neither as Text Nor as PixelsLatentPress: Context Compression Beyond Text and Vision
• Paper Walkthrough: Eleven Frames Are Enough — Revisiting Local Context for Long-Horizon Streaming 3D ReconstructionRevisiting Local Context for Long-Horizon Streaming 3D Reconstruction