Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performance
Long-horizon benchmarks often show that agents fail more as tasks become longer. This observation is useful for deployment, but it does not by itself explain why failure occurs. More stages create more opportunities for ordinary errors to compound; longer tasks may also contain harder individual decisions or become harder as conversation history, tool outputs, and environment changes accumulate. We use trajectory-induced degradation to mean this last possibility: earlier execution makes later work harder. When the harmful accumulation is specifically the text visible to the model, it is often called context rot. In this position paper, we argue that to claim a "long-horizon failure", benc...
| Authors | Chao Peng, Zhiheng Lyu, Peijie Dong et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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