Context window sizing for fine-tuning: how long should your training examples be?

Fine-tuning example length is a design decision, not a byproduct of your data. Pad too short and you teach a distribution you’ll never see at inference; let examples sprawl and you pay quadratic training cost to memorize context you should be retrieving. How to size training sequences to the context you’ll actually serve.

July 18, 2026 · 5 min · 1039 words · Loop & Retry