Context as an Environment: Programmatic Context Management for Long-Horizon Agents
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.