Glossary / Context and meaning preservation
Hermeneutic Drift
Hermeneutic Drift is a shift in what the system takes the task, document, or referent to be about as context is retrieved, summarized, or carried across turns. A model answers about the wrong document or entity because recency or adjacency pulls the latest-retrieved context to the foreground; the words of the question stay the same while the referent moves.
How it manifests · Illustrative vector
Illustrative vector: across a multi-document session, the most recently retrieved passage pulls the model's sense of which document is in play to the foreground, and it answers about the wrong contract or entity while the question's wording never changed.
Related terms
- Retrieval mutation · Context and meaning preservation
- Context integrity · Context and meaning preservation