提出新框架理解对话中模型行为的渐变,发现可调控的稳定平衡态。
Drift No More? Context Equilibria in Multi-Turn LLM Interactions
- 用KL散度量化每轮输出与目标模型的偏离程度。
- 实测多个大模型在长对话中趋于稳定而非持续恶化。
- 简单提醒干预能有效抑制偏差,适合长期交互场景研究者。
大语言模型在单轮任务中表现优异,但在多轮持续交互中常出现上下文漂移:模型输出随轮次逐渐偏离用户目标。本文提出一种动态框架,将漂移建模为基于令牌级预测分布的逐轮KL散度,并将其演化视为具有恢复力的有界随机过程。在合成长序列重写任务和$τ$-Bench等真实用户代理模拟中,对多个开源大模型进行测试,结果一致显示漂移趋向于噪声限制下的稳定平衡态,而非失控退化。同时,简单的提醒干预可显著降低偏差,符合理论预期。研究表明,多轮漂移是可控的平衡现象,而非必然衰减,为长期交互中的上下文管理提供了新范式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at single-turn tasks such as instruction following and summarization, yet real-world deployments require sustained multi-turn interactions where user goals and conversational context persist and evolve. A recurring challenge in this setting is context drift: the gradual divergence of a model's outputs from goal-consistent behavior across turns. Unlike single-turn errors, drift unfolds temporally and is poorly captured by static evaluation metrics. In this work, we present a study of context drift in multi-turn interactions and propose a simple dynamical framework to interpret its behavior. We formalize drift as the turn-wise KL divergence between the token-level predictive distributions of the test model and a goal-consistent reference model, and propose a recurrence model that interprets its evolution as a bounded stochastic process with restoring forces and controllable interventions. We instantiate this framework in both synthetic long-horizon rewriting tasks and realistic user-agent simulations such as in $τ$-Bench, measuring drift for several open-weight LLMs that are used as user simulators. Our experiments consistently reveal stable, noise-limited equilibria rather than runaway degradation, and demonstrate that simple reminder interventions reliably reduce divergence in line with theoretical predictions. Together, these results suggest that multi-turn drift can be understood as a controllable equilibrium phenomenon rather than as inevitable decay, providing a foundation for studying and mitigating context drift in extended interactions.
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