arXiv AI By Jeanne Salle, Hardik Bhatnagar, Matthias Bethge, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko

Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Compaction-Friendly

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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.

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