# Detecting Overflow in Compressed Token Representations for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generation and context integration, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 14 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Generation and context integration](https://mlsanity.com/rag/generation-and-context-integration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [xRAG: Extreme Context Compression for Retrieval-augmented Generation with One Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13792/) (2024)
- [Do Androids Know They're Only Dreaming of Electric Sheep?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17249/) (2023)
- [Cramming 1568 Tokens into a Single Vector and Back Again: Exploring the Limits of Embedding Space Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13063/) (2025)
- [Beyond Hard and Soft: Hybrid Context Compression for Balancing Local and Global Information Retention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15774/) (2025)
- [Data-efficient Meta-models for Evaluation of Context-based Questions and Answers in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23299/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Evaluating Compressed Memory: Dependence, Utility, and Content Benefit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19373/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient long-context processing remains a crucial challenge for contemporary large language models (LLMs), especially in resource-constrained environments. Soft compression architectures promise to extend effective context length by replacing long token sequences with smaller sets of learned compressed tokens. Yet, the limits of compressibility -- and when compression begins to erase task-relevant content -- remain underexplored. In this paper, we define token overflow as a regime in which compressed representations no longer contain sufficient information to answer a given query, and propose a methodology to characterize and detect it. In the xRAG soft-compression setting, we find that query-agnostic saturation statistics reliably separate compressed from uncompressed token representations, providing a practical tool for identifying compressed tokens but showing limited overflow detection capability. Lightweight probing classifiers over both query and context xRAG representations detect overflow with 0.72 AUC-ROC on average on HotpotQA, SQuADv2, and TriviaQA datasets, demonstrating that incorporating query information improves detection performance. These results advance from query-independent diagnostics to query-aware detectors, enabling low-cost pre-LLM gating to mitigate compression-induced errors.