Living systematic review

Long-context / context-window extension

Extending the usable context window of LLMs — rotary-position scaling (RoPE/PI/NTK/YaRN/LongRoPE), length extrapolation, and long-context fine-tuning.

69 papers137 critique receipts595 benchmark resultsupdated Jun 18, 2026

Most-superseded baselines

Ranked by how many distinct papers critique or beat each method — the standard baselines newer work routinely measures against.

  1. 1
    RoPE

    RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding

    17 critique · 8 beaten on benchmarks

  2. 2
    YaRN

    YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models

    10 critique · 8 beaten on benchmarks

  3. 3
    Position Interpolationin YaRN

    Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation

    8 critique · 5 beaten on benchmarks

  4. 4
    APEin RoPE

    APE: Faster and Longer Context-Augmented Generation via Adaptive Parallel Encoding

    8 critique · 3 beaten on benchmarks

  5. 5
    StreamingLLM

    Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks

    3 critique · 7 beaten on benchmarks

  6. 6
    NTK-awarein YaRN

    4 critique · 6 beaten on benchmarks

  7. 7
    ALiBiin RoPE

    Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation

    4 critique · 5 beaten on benchmarks

  8. 8
    Self-Extendin YaRN

    LLM Maybe LongLM: Self-Extend LLM Context Window Without Tuning

    5 critique · 4 beaten on benchmarks

  9. 9
    H2Oin StreamingLLM

    H$_2$O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models

    5 critique · 3 beaten on benchmarks

  10. 10
    Activation Beacon

    Long Context Compression with Activation Beacon

    2 critique · 4 beaten on benchmarks

  11. 11
    MInferencein StreamingLLM

    1 critique · 4 beaten on benchmarks

  12. 12
    KERPLEin RoPE

    KERPLE: Kernelized Relative Positional Embedding for Length Extrapolation

    2 critique · 3 beaten on benchmarks

The competition

Methods that fight on the same benchmarks cluster into distinct sub-problems.

YaRN24 methods

YaRN · Position Interpolation · NTK-aware · Self-Extend · DCA · LongRoPE

RoPE18 methods

RoPE · APE · ALiBi · KERPLE · FIRE · HoPE

StreamingLLM24 methods

StreamingLLM · H2O · MInference · SnapKV · Quest · PyramidKV

Activation Beacon12 methods

Activation Beacon · CEPE · Mamba · HMT · LongLLMLingua · RMT

LongLoRA13 methods

LongLoRA · ABF · LoCoCo · D2O · FastKV · ThinK

RAG6 methods

RAG · CoA · LongAgent · Chain-of-Agents (CoA) · Graph of Agents (GoA) · XpandA

Ring Attention4 methods

Ring Attention · BigBird · Longformer · ΠAttention

The frontier

Recent methods not yet superseded in the knowledge base.