> First of all, system prompts and things like agent.md never leave the context regardless of the length of the session, so the canary has absolutely zero meaning in this situation, making any judgements based on its disappearance totally misguided and simply a case of seeing what you want to see.
You're focusing on the wrong thing, ironically. Even if things are in the context, attention is what matters, and the intuition isn't about if that thing is included in the context or not, as you say, it'll always will be. It's about if the model will pay attention to it, in the Transformers sense, which it doesn't always do.
> It's about if the model will pay attention to it, in the Transformers sense, which it doesn't always do.
Right... Which is why the "canary" idea doesn't make much sense. The fact that the model isn't paying attention to the canary instruction doesn't demonstrate that the model has stopped paying attention to some other instruction that's relevant to the task - it proves nothing. If anything, a better performing model should pay less attention to the canary since it becomes less and less relevant as the context is filled with tokens relevant to the task.
You're focusing on the wrong thing, ironically. Even if things are in the context, attention is what matters, and the intuition isn't about if that thing is included in the context or not, as you say, it'll always will be. It's about if the model will pay attention to it, in the Transformers sense, which it doesn't always do.