Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance (Paper Analysis) @YannicKilcher
Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance (Paper Analysis)  @YannicKilcher
Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Paper: research.trychroma.com/context-rot

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically presumed to process context uniformly—that is, the model should handle the 10,000th token just as reliably as the 100th. However, in practice, this assumption does not hold. We observe that model performance varies significantly as input length changes, even on simple tasks.
In this report, we evaluate 18 LLMs, including the state-of-the-art GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, and Qwen3 models. Our results reveal that models do not use their context uniformly; instead, their performance grows increasingly unreliable as input length grows.

Authors: Kelly Hong, Anton Troynikov, Jeff Huber

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Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance (Paper Analysis)

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