arXiv Machine Learning

Towards Reliable Context Compression for Long-Horizon Agents: An Empirical Study of Execution Instability

The paper investigates how recurrent context compression affects long‑horizon agents, finding that compression can diminish the impact of recent interactions, leading to more blocked actions, repeated exploration, and run‑to‑run instability. To address this, the authors propose TRACE, a verifier‑guided framework that evaluates individual compression events via paired closed‑loop continuations and optimizes a natural‑language compression prompt while keeping all models frozen. Early experiments on AppWorld demonstrate that TRACE improves task performance, multi‑run reliability, and context‑execution efficiency compared to existing compression baselines.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

StateComp: Learning When to Compress History in Long Horizon Agents

StateComp introduces a method for long‑horizon agents to decide when to compress historical interactions based on the current agent state, rather than relying on fixed windows or periodic schedules. The framework uses a two‑stage annotation process to create KEEP and READY labels, trains an imbalance‑aware router on frozen language model representations, and groups adjacent READY interactions into compact summaries. Experiments on WorkBuddyBench show that StateComp cuts agent and summarization tokens by 52.27% and speeds up representation extraction 12.67‑fold while preserving task performance.

By Mingxuan Wang, Hongyue Chen, Yinglong Guo, Fei Luo, Chao Ning, Bo Wang, Guorun Yao, Yanbiao Ma, Jungong Han
arXiv AI
Jul 1

ACE: Pluggable Adaptive Context Elasticizer across Agents

arXiv:2606. 31564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing complexity of agentic tasks has led to rapidly growing trajectory lengths, which poses significant challenges for large language model (LLM) based agents with fixed context windows.

By Ning Liao, Zihao Long, Xiaoxing Wang, Xue Yang, Yaoming Wang, Ziyuan Zhuang, Xunliang Cai, Rongxiang Weng, Junchi Yan
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

ContextPilot: Teaching Agents for Proactive Context Management via Fine-grained RL

ContextPilot is a proactive context‑management framework designed to improve long‑horizon agentic reasoning with large language models. It expands the toolset to include planning, long‑term memory, and soft context offloading, and introduces a reinforcement‑learning strategy that focuses on critical editing decisions and assigns action‑level advantages. Experiments on long‑context QA and deep search tasks demonstrate that ContextPilot achieves stronger performance with a more compact working context, outperforming existing baselines across various base models and benchmarks.

By Zhuoshi Pan, Qizhi Pei, Junru Lu, Honglin Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Di Yin, Xing Sun
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 2

Control Under Compression: Reliability Frontiers for Tool-Using Agents

Tool-using language-model agents are governed not only by task prompts but also by persistent system-side instructions that specify tools, arguments, policies, execution protocols, and recovery. Compressing these agent control contexts (ACCs) can reduce input cost and context use, yet existing prompt-compression evaluations do not reveal whether the resulting control remains operationally reliable.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

DTOC: Dynamic Tool Output Compression for Adaptive Context Management in AI Agents

The paper introduces Dynamic Tool Output Compression (DTOC), a framework that manages context in large‑language‑model agents by storing full tool outputs in external memory and inserting compact placeholders into the active context. DTOC treats context updates as explicit, reversible operations within the agent’s reasoning loop, allowing selective reconstruction of compressed outputs when needed. Experiments on the DeepSWE benchmark show that for responsive models such as Sonnet 4.6 and GPT‑5.4, DTOC reduces input tokens and agent steps while significantly improving solve rates and lowering cost per solved task, with ablation studies confirming the importance of reversibility for maintaining performance.

By Abhay Chaturvedi, Shreya Bhattacharya, Rashmika Gopalkrishnan, Peter van der Putten
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)
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

IACM-RL: Intent-Aware Context Management and Reinforcement Learning for Complex Tool Invocation under Dynamic Intent Fluctuations

arXiv:2608.02110v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Executing long-horizon tool invocations in real-world environments is severely challenged by dynamic user intent noise. Existing methods attempt ro...

By Dingwei Zhu, Jiahan Li, Chengjun Pan, Yunxian Yang, Yunbin Zhao, Yunke Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Zhuohui Sheng, Chenhao Huang, Jiahang Lin, Yajie Yang, Junlin Shang, Shichun Liu, Yuhui Wang, Honglin Guo, Junjie Ye, Xin Guo, Jiazheng Zhang, Ming Zhang, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang