arXiv AI By Shantanu Dixit, Anson Bastos, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan

FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents

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The paper introduces FOCUS, a training‑free framework that compresses the interaction history of large language model agents by preserving only the past interactions that causally influence future decisions. Unlike prior methods that learn compression policies offline, FOCUS operates entirely at test time, requiring no additional data collection or fine‑tuning and can be applied to any closed‑API model. Experiments on a variety of agentic benchmarks show that FOCUS reduces peak context length by up to 48% and dependency by 73%, while improving task success by up to 8.9 percentage points.

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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
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.

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