Gist-based context compression---summarising older conversation history into compact representations---is a common approach in long-horizon language model agents, yet its effect on different types of memory retrieval is poorly understood. We use Salience-Weighted Consolidation (SWC), a biologically-inspired compression framework motivated by sleep-based memory consolidation, as a diagnostic probe to study when gist compression helps and when it hurts.
The paper proposes a training‑free detector that uses sentence‑level context sensitivity to identify unsupported content in retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) answers. By re‑scoring each sentence with full context, no context, and each chunk removed, the method flags the chunk whose removal most reduces a sentence’s likelihood as the likely source. Evaluated on RAGTruth, TofuEval, and RAGBench, the detector outperforms answer‑level faithfulness scores, achieving AUCs up to 0.745 and matching per‑chunk fact‑checkers while using only a fraction of the compute required by large‑language‑model judges.
By Mohamed Aly Bouke
arXiv:2608. 11775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gist-based context compression---summarising older conversation history into compact representations---is a common approach in long-horizon language model agents, yet its effect on different types of memory retrieval is poorly understood.
By Nicholas E. Kyrkewood
arXiv:2609.37469v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external sources, but retrieved passages often name the right entities without...
By Suting Chen, Peichun Hua, Yunming Xiao
arXiv:2608. 04569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hard prompt compression reduces long-context inference cost by independently scoring tokens, sentences, or chunks and retaining the highest-scoring units under a budget.
By Zhengpei Hu, Kai Li, Dapeng Fu, Xuechao Zou, Yuanhao Tang, Yue Li, Tengfei Cao, Jianqiang Huang
Long‑horizon LLM agents use context compaction to replace an overflowing interaction history with a natural‑language summary. The paper shows that these summaries mix factual environment data with the compressor’s reasoning, making it hard for the agent to distinguish the two. The authors introduce Source‑Judged Compaction (SJC), a training‑free post‑processing step that scores each summary entry for a source in the environment or previous summary and removes unsupported entries, improving cross‑run reliability by 2.1%–8.9% on AppWorld and OfficeBench without increasing token usage.
By Guanghui Min, Chen Chen