Definition
The progressive loss of factual integrity or original intent as data undergoes multiple transformations—such as recursive summarization or multi-agent handoffs—creating a trade-off where increased pipeline complexity enables sophisticated reasoning but exponentially increases the risk of 'meaning decay'.
Not to be confused with 'Concept Drift', which involves changing statistical properties of external data over time.
"A high-stakes game of 'Telephone' where each whisper is a different LLM call or retrieval step."
- Hallucination(Common downstream symptom of drift)
- Multi-hop Retrieval(Architectural pattern highly susceptible to drift)
- Chain of Thought (CoT)(Reasoning method where internal drift can derail the final answer)
- Grounding(The primary mechanism used to anchor output and prevent drift)
Conceptual Overview
The progressive loss of factual integrity or original intent as data undergoes multiple transformations—such as recursive summarization or multi-agent handoffs—creating a trade-off where increased pipeline complexity enables sophisticated reasoning but exponentially increases the risk of 'meaning decay'.
Disambiguation
Not to be confused with 'Concept Drift', which involves changing statistical properties of external data over time.
Visual Analog
A high-stakes game of 'Telephone' where each whisper is a different LLM call or retrieval step.