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Unit Study Document

Context Windows & Token Compression

7 min readβ€’Visual explainer included

The Context Bloat Problem πŸ“‰

Longer prompts mean higher latency and cost. Large Language Models process tokens with quadratic self-attention complexity. Managing the context window is critical for production engineering.

Prompt Caching: By reusing static context blocks (e.g. system instructions, database schemas), model providers skip computing attention for identical prefixes, dropping costs up to 50%.
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Question

What is the complexity of standard self-attention?

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Answer

Quadratic (O(NΒ²)) relative to the context window length.

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What is prompt caching?

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Active Recalls

Card 1 of 1
Question

What is the complexity of standard self-attention?

Tap card to flip
Answer

Quadratic (O(NΒ²)) relative to the context window length.

Mastery: 0%

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