What if LLMs Ate Their Words: Causal History Effects in Multi-Turn Interaction

Abstract

Multi-turn interaction creates a feedback process in which an LLM's previous responses become context for later behavior. Prior work shows substantial multi-turn degradation and that assistant-generated history can affect later behavior. However, it remains unclear how these effects manifest across models, tasks, turns, and inside a model. We study these gaps across six task families and five models. Degradation from fully specified single-turn input (FULL) to progressively revealed multi-turn interaction (SHARDED) is clearly task- and model-dependent, and stronger one-shot performance does not imply greater interaction robustness. We then retrospectively analyze completed SHARDED conversations by replaying the user messages already observed in each trajectory while editing only assistant-generated history. Replacing prior assistant responses with neutral content (termed neutralization) changes downstream min-max normalized performance by +.027 across 2,973 trajectories. On a prespecified length-controlled subset, short and length-matched neutralization yield nearly identical effects (+.069 versus +.068), showing that simple context shortening is insufficient to explain the effect of history editing. Turn Surgery further intervenes on one assistant turn at a time. Among 237 selected degraded trajectories, 63.7% contain at least one beneficial intervention, while most tested positions remain unchanged; for binary tasks, 48.4% admit a fail-to-success reversal. An open-weight case study links behaviorally consequential history changes to measurable downstream state differences, but finds task-dependent rather than universal internal signatures. Overall, assistant-generated history has active but selective effects on multi-turn performance, motivating selective rather than uniform history management.