Equation 5 · Context Window Size Versus What a Frontier Model Can Actually Recall From It
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Put the documentation and the independent benchmarks side by side and a pattern emerges that is more informative than any single score. Formalise the distinction the whole comparison rests on: let W be the context window a vendor documents for a given model, a fixed engineering figure set by attention implementation, position encoding, and what the serving stack supports. Let S(n) be some benchmark’s measured accuracy at input length n W , and the same benchmark’s accuracy at a short reference length. For a chosen retention threshold , define the effective context length as
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