# Encoding Context into LLM Weights: What Makes It Context?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17686/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06654/) (2024)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14913/) (2020)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08696/) (2021)
- [Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05102/) (2022)
- [Fast Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11309/) (2021)
- [LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06839/) (2023)
- [LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15204/) (2024)
- [Learning to (Learn at Test Time): RNNs with Expressive Hidden States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04620/) (2024)
- [Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00663/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15383/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Training Done Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23884/) (2025)
- [Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05381/) (2025)
- [A Kernel-Based View of Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05643/) (2022)
- [Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16008/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Longer contexts allow large language models (LLMs) to condition their predictions on more information, but inference costs grow prohibitively with context length. An emerging alternative uses test-time updates to encode context as temporary changes to model weights. However, encoding this information into weights that already represent general knowledge obscures its role as context, so the LLM may fail to use it properly to condition subsequent inference. To restore this contextual role, we first associate each context with an identifier during encoding, thereby distinguishing the newly encoded information from pre-existing knowledge. Invoking the identifier at inference then enables the LLM to recite the encoded context. Nevertheless, successful recitation does not ensure that the LLM will use the recalled information as context. We therefore further introduce a prompting framework that explicitly guides the LLM to use this information as context. Across diverse controlled tasks and practical benchmarks, our method outperformed the baseline using only off-the-shelf LLMs, showing its advances in context encoding.