This discussion explores how irrelevant information within long context windows affects an LLM's ability to retrieve correct answers. It specifically examines how the Transformer's self-attention mechanism—utilizing Query, Key, and Value vectors—distributes attention across tokens as context length increases. The user notes that excessive information can sometimes degrade performance, prompting questions about the trade-offs between large context windows and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
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reddit/r/LocalLLM