Hard prompt compression causes referential dangling in 34-60% of cases
August 4, 2026
Hard prompt compression methods that score tokens or chunks independently frequently split dependent evidence pairs. At a 0.30 compression ratio, the Beaver compressor fails to maintain complete answer paths in 34-54% of bridge examples, with some compressors reaching 60% failure rates on HotpotQA.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
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builderBe cautious when using hard compression for multi-hop reasoning tasks, as it risks deleting critical context.
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researcherThis highlights a fundamental structural limitation in independent token/chunk scoring methods.