arXiv AI

Context as an Environment: Programmatic Context Management for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

KVMem: Virtualizing Million-Token Agent Workspaces on a Consumer GPU

KVMem is a KV-context virtualization system that allows large language model agents to maintain workspaces exceeding both GPU key‑value capacity and the model’s native context window. It stores overflowed history as paged KV state across GPU memory, host memory, and NVMe, using lightweight, model‑native attention‑space indexes to retrieve relevant historical blocks. Evaluations on long‑context agent benchmarks show that KVMem improves task utility and inference efficiency, enabling up to one million‑token workspaces on consumer GPUs and achieving interactive responsiveness in local deployments.

By Di Chai, Leye Wang, Zeshen Su, Zhiguo Xia, Zhihang Yu
arXiv AI
Oct 27

CTXAgent - Self-Controlled Context Management of LLM Agents

The paper introduces CTXAgent, a self‑controlled context management system for large language model agents that compacts conversation history when a token threshold is reached. It evaluates seven frontier models, comparing their ability to manage context with and without dedicated tools, and benchmarks performance across coding, scientific, and software engineering tasks. Results show that well‑managed models keep live context below 100k tokens, maintain high benchmark scores, and achieve significant cost reductions, with Claude Opus 5.5 outperforming its explicit configuration by 34% lower cost.

By Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Roland C. Aydin, Christian Feiler, Christian J. Cyron
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Compress What You See, Not What You Say: Anchored Context Distillation for Latent-Observation Software Engineering Agents

The paper introduces LOHA, a context layout that compresses older tool observations into soft tokens while keeping the agent’s own turns and the last K observations in plain text, and ACD, a training method that distills full‑text predictions into this latent representation while anchoring behavior on plain text. This approach reduces context per call by up to 57% without significant loss in resolve rates, and improves instance throughput in single‑GPU serving. Experiments on SWE‑bench Verified show that K=3 yields a 43–57% compression with only modest performance impact, while larger windows favor task performance over compression.

By Zhensheng Zou (Peking University), Guoqing Wang (Peking University), Dan Hao (Peking University)