Context Cartography: Toward Structured Governance of Contextual Space in Large Language Model Systems
The prevailing approach to improving large language model (LLM) reasoning has centered on expanding context windows, implicitly assuming that more tokens yield better performance. However, empirical evidence - including the "lost in the middle" effect and long-distance relational degradation - demonstrates that contextual space exhibits structural gradients, salience asymmetries, and entropy accumulation under transformer architectures. We introduce Context Cartography, a formal framework for the deliberate governance of contextual space. We define a tripartite zonal model partitioning the informational universe into black fog (unobserved), gray fog (stored memory), and the visible field ...
| Authors | Zihua Wu, Georg Gartner |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 March 2026 |
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