Glossary / Context and meaning preservation
Reduction drift
Reduction drift is the loss or reweighting of meaning when richer material is compressed into a smaller representation such as a summary, score, memory item, or rubric output. Each reduction step can quietly change emphasis, so summarization and scoring are treated as part of the language runtime layer rather than as neutral plumbing.
How it manifests · Illustrative vector
Illustrative vector: a long incident report is compressed into a one-line memory item or a single rubric score, and the compression quietly drops the one caveat that changed the conclusion. Treating summarization and scoring as part of the runtime layer is how it gets caught.
Related terms
- Context integrity · Context and meaning preservation
- Retrieval mutation · Context and meaning preservation