Lost in Context Compaction: When LLM Systems Drop Side Constraints
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.
arXiv:2608. 11242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When the context window is under pressure, LLM systems compact prior context to continue ongoing tasks.
arXiv:2606. 22528v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on context compaction, summarization, or eviction to keep long-running sessions within a token budget.
arXiv:2607. 09493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic LLM systems that generate code through multi-turn tool use face a fundamental context problem: each session starts from zero, discarding the configuration choices, domain constraints, data schemas, and tool-use patterns that made previous sessions productive.
The paper introduces the concept of State Integrity Collapse, where large language models remember a constraint but fail to apply it in later dialogue turns. It presents StateTrack‑Bench, a suite of controlled conversations testing numerical, format, role/persona, factual‑memory, and logical‑rule constraints across multiple model snapshots and dialogue depths. The study finds that while strict joint retention can be high, failures are largely due to behavioral drift rather than simple forgetting, and that reliability must be assessed over long‑horizon dialogues rather than single‑turn instruction following.
Agent-Controlled Forgetting for Tool-Using Agents: Reversible Context Curation in Practice explores a method where an agent selectively replaces detailed tool results with concise notes while archiving the originals for recovery. Using a Python harness, the approach reduces prompt tokens from 912,492 to 231,951 and cuts cumulative input tokens by 50%, yielding significant API cost savings. However, the method increases request count, slightly slows execution, and its effectiveness varies across different workloads.
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.