Lost in Context: Addressing Context Anxiety in Large Language Models
arXiv:2607.21616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional wisdom suggests that reasoning models fail when problems exceed their capabilities. However, we find that frontier reasoning models sometimes possess the necessary capabilities to solve problems but fail due to premature self-doubt -- a phenomenon informally known as context anxiety. We provide the first systematic study of context anxiety, demonstrating that it arises, in part, from a model's inability to accurately estimate the token