Why Do LLMs Struggle in Multi-Turn Conversations? Causes, Impacts & Solutions

Understanding LLM Multi-Turn Conversation Challenges: Causes, Impacts, and Solutions Core Insights and Operational Mechanics of LLM Performance Drops 1.1 The Cliff Effect in Dialogue Performance Recent research reveals a dramatic 39% performance gap in large language models (LLMs) between single-turn (90% success rate) and multi-turn conversations (65% success rate) when handling underspecified instructions. This “conversation cliff” phenomenon is particularly pronounced in logic-intensive tasks like mathematical reasoning and code generation. Visualization of information degradation in extended conversations (Credit: Unsplash) 1.2 Failure Mechanism Analysis Through 200,000 simulated dialogues, researchers identified two critical failure components: Aptitude Loss: 16% decrease in best-case scenario performance …