Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are not only limited to some maximum
context length, but also are not able to robustly consume long inputs. To
address these limitations, we propose ReadAgent, an LLM agent system that
increases effective context length up to 20x in our experiments. Inspired by
how humans interactively read long documents, we implement ReadAgent as a
simple prompting system that uses the advanced language capabilities of LLMs to
(1) decide what content to store together in a memory episode, (2) compress
those memory episodes into short episodic memories called gist memories, and
(3) take actions to look up passages in the original text if ReadAgent needs to
remind itself of relevant details to complete a task. We evaluate ReadAgent
against baselines using retrieval methods, using the original long contexts,
and using the gist memories. These evaluations are performed on three
long-document reading comprehension tasks: QuALITY, NarrativeQA, and QMSum.
ReadAgent outperforms the baselines on all three tasks while extending the
effective context window by 3-20x.

通过使用先进的语言模型的高级语言能力，ReadAgent 系统提出来解决当前大型语言模型的上下文长度限制以及长输入的问题，并通过将内容存储到内存片段中，将其压缩为称为要点内存的短暂记忆，并在需要时在原始文本中查找相关细节，从而在三个长文档阅读理解任务上胜过基线方法，同时将有效上下文窗口增加了 3-20 倍。