Predicting Task Performance with Context-aware Scaling Laws
Authors: name: Kyle Montgomery; name: David Park; name: Jianhong Tu; name: Michael Bendersky; name: Beliz Gunel; name: Dawn Song; name: Chenguang Wang
Published: 2025-10-16 17:35:18

Abstract: Scaling laws have transformed our understanding of large language models by
linking upstream metrics like cross-entropy loss to design factors such as
model size, training data, and compute. However, these conventional laws fail
to capture downstream task performance, where context plays a critical role. In
this work, we propose a straightforward, interpretable framework that jointly
models downstream performance as a function of the training compute and the
provided context. We empirically validate our framework by fitting it on the
observed downstream performance of extended-context variants of Llama-2-7B and
Llama-2-13B across 65,500 unique instances spanning three tasks: arithmetic
reasoning, common sense reasoning, and machine translation. Our results
demonstrate that our framework accurately models in-distribution downstream
performance, generalizes across three orders of magnitude in training compute,
and reliably extrapolates performance as the amount of context increases. These
findings offer valuable insights into the interplay between training compute
and context utilization, providing guidance for designing more efficient
long-context LLMs for diverse downstream tasks. Our code is available at
https://github.com/wang-research-lab/context-scaling.