long-term

Definition

Spanning a long horizon. It appears in long-term memory, meaning information a system can retrieve across sessions rather than only within one context window; in long-range dependency, meaning relationships between distant elements of a sequence; and in long-term credit assignment, the reinforcement-learning problem of attributing a delayed outcome to the actions that caused it. What these share is that errors compound over the horizon, so short-run evaluations are misleading.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: MerchantBench — Can an LLM Agent Run an Online Store for a Year? Why It Earns Only 27.3% of What Humans DoMerchantBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Long-Term Coherence in E-Commerce Operations