The paper investigates how context compaction—losing information to free up a language model’s context window—affects performance on long‑horizon agentic tasks. Using the OpenCode scaffold and five compaction strategies, the authors evaluate three frontier models on PaperBench, ProgramBench, and PostTrainBench, finding that compaction thresholds largely do not hurt performance for 1M‑context models, but can degrade GPT‑5.3‑Codex on certain benchmarks. The study also shows that compaction can silently drop critical task constraints, especially on ProgramBench and real user‑agent sessions from SWE‑chat, yet current benchmarks remain largely compaction‑friendly because objectives are fixed and progress is stored externally.
By Jeanne Salle, Hardik Bhatnagar, Matthias Bethge, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko
Long-horizon tool agents are bottlenecked by how their context grows toward the limits of the context window. Recent systems make context management agent- or system-controlled, but they either learn a compression policy that discards evidence or manage context in a layer the agent never sees.
The paper introduces Context Language Models (CLMs), which treat context as a mutable file that the model can update freely, enabling the model to learn what information to retain. CLMs built zero‑shot from existing models outperform state‑of‑the‑art context‑management methods on several benchmarks, achieving higher accuracy with fewer FLOPs. The authors also demonstrate that CLMs can be steered via natural‑language instructions and online reinforcement learning, and they propose a suffix‑cache reuse strategy that further reduces server‑side compute.
By Rulin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Junjie Oscar Yin, Yuetai Li, Minheng Wang, Hamish Ivison, Radha Poovendran, Nathan Lambert, Teng Xiao, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh
arXiv:2609.00759v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly handle in-context learning (ICL) tasks where a long, novel context defines the rules, knowledge, and output s...
By Jinhu Qi, Minda Hu, Wentao Zhang, Weiqiang Jin, Yanyu Chen, Junli Wang, Irwin King
We introduce Context Language Models (CLMs), language models that natively manage their own context. We implement this by treating the context as a file and allowing the model to make unrestricted upd...
The study investigates how individual components of a coding harness—planning, action space, and context management—affect autonomous coding agents’ performance. By fixing the execution loop and varying these components across 176 settings on SWE‑Bench Verified and Terminal‑Bench 2.1, the authors find that context management is most valuable when context windows are tight, staging rule‑based elision before LLM summarization yields the best efficiency, planning serves as an accuracy scaffold for weaker models and a cost saver for stronger ones, and predefined tools help models with limited bash skills while bash‑capable models benefit from a bash‑only interface. Trajectory‑level analysis shows that context management lengthens execution paths, planning alters where trajectories terminate, and the action space determines code granularity, offering a modular framework for future harness design.
By Run-Ze Fan, Zihao Zhang, Simin Ma, Yebowen Hu, Shouju Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Fei Liu, Hamed Zamani, Xiaoyang Wang
arXiv:2607. 20064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon tasks require sustained perception, reasoning, and exploration, and are a persistent challenge for large language model (LLM) agents.
By Alexis Fox, Junlin Wang, Paul Rosu, Bhuwan Dhingra
arXiv:2608.21690v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly take on long-running tasks whose history grows far beyond a single model context window. Existing approaches compress earlier i...
By Yin Lin, Elaine Ang, Erkang Zhu, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou
arXiv:2604.23069v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents often struggle in long-context interactions. As the history grows, sliding windows and prompt compression may dro...
By Yating Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Sayan Ghosh, Sourya Basu, Anoop Deoras, Jun Huan, Gaurav Gupta
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
CliffCompaction is an autocompaction technique that reduces cost by up to 50% while maintaining or improving performance on benchmarks such as Terminal‑Bench and KernelBench. It achieves this by truncating or dropping content without rephrasing, ensuring compacted information remains faithful and preventing context drift. The method enables efficient test‑time scaling, matching or surpassing higher‑cost models like Opus 4.7 and GPT‑5.3 Codex, and delivers significant CUDA kernel speedups on KernelBench.
By Trang Nguyen, Eulrang Cho, Bingqing Chen, Tim Dettmers
LLM agents increasingly take on long-running tasks whose history grows far beyond a single model context window. Existing approaches compress earlier interactions or extract selected information into...