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Other literature type . 2025
License: CC BY
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Other literature type . 2025
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Evans' Law: A Predictive Threshold for Long-Context Accuracy Collapse in Large Language Models

Authors: Evans, Jennifer;

Evans' Law: A Predictive Threshold for Long-Context Accuracy Collapse in Large Language Models

Abstract

Update – Version 2 (7 November 2025): This record now includes the complete dataset, regression notebook, and detailed methods note for replication. The work remains preliminary and exploratory. All data and code are provided for transparency, and independent validation is encouraged. Abstract Language models exhibit consistent performance decay as input and output lengths increase. This paper presents Evans’ Law, defining the relationship between context length and accuracy degradation. Evans’ Law: The likelihood of errors rises super-linearly with prompt and output length until accuracy falls below 50 percent, following a power-law relationship determined by model capacity and task complexity. Initial experimental validation confirms that the phenomenon exists and provides empirical data to refine the mathematical formulation. The updated dataset and regression analysis extend this validation, showing a sub-linear scaling curve consistent across multiple large-language-model families. Key materials in this version: • Full dataset of coherence-loss threshold measurements (evanslaw_dataset.csv) • Regression notebook (evanslaw_regression.ipynb) • Regression analysis export (evanslaw_regression.html) • Visualization of observed vs theoretical fits (evanslaw_plot.png) All data were collected under deterministic prompting conditions (temperature 0.2, top-p 1.0). Methods and limitations are documented in the accompanying methods_note.pdf.

Keywords

Power law, AI safety, Long context, LLMs, Evans Law, Large language models, AI reliability, error propagation

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
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Average