Context Poisoning: Multi-Step Agents Contaminating Themselves
CombinationFormer638 · reddit · 2026-07-08
The author reflects that the real challenge in multi-step agent workflows isn't tool calling, but preventing residual information from previous steps from bleeding into the current one. In one test—summarizing a PDF, calling a weather API, and then summarizing another PDF—the final summary bizarrely incorporated London's cloud cover as a supply chain metaphor in a logistics answer. The tool calls themselves were correct; the issue stemmed from a dirty state. The author advocates for minimizing input at each step, cleaning up outputs, and reducing residue, noting that clean step boundaries remain an unsolved challenge.
Related event: Context Poisoning in Multi-Step Agent Workflows(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Alibaba and Cornell Paper: Independent Critic Boosts Coding Agents by up to 9.5 Points — dair_ai · 2026-10-27
- CodeRabbit Secure now tracks vulnerabilities across repos and replays exploits in a sandbox — julsimon · 2026-10-27
- Hermes Agent Adds Model Routing: Assign Different Models per Sub-Agent Task — Teknium · 2026-10-27
- GPT-6.1 Terra hits 78.5 on Browser Use Benchmark, near Sol at 35% less cost — sandersted · 2026-10-27
- Memory Tax paper: most agent memory systems still lose to naive RAG — omarsar0 · 2026-10-27
- Async RL recipes converge: score centering and masked importance sampling now default in TRL — _lewtun · 2026-10-27