Why Retrying Fails: Context Contamination in LLM Agent Pipelines
When an LLM agent fails a multi-step tool-augmented task and retries, the failed attempt typically remains in its context window -- contaminating the next attempt and elevating the per-step error rate beyond the base level. This context-contaminated restart phenomenon is widely observed in practice yet entirely lacks formal treatment. We introduce the Context-Contaminated Restart Model (CCRM): a chain of T tool-call steps, each failing with base rate epsilon_0; after any failed attempt, the subsequent attempt operates in contaminated context with elevated error rate epsilon_1 > epsilon_0. Under this model we derive five main results. (R1) An exact closed-form formula for P(succeed in at m...
| Authors | Zhanfu Yang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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