# U-Fold: Dynamic Intent-Aware Context Folding for User-Centric Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12045/) (2024)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03768/) (2020)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12983/) (2023)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12516/) (2025)
- [MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10691/) (2023)
- [MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15841/) (2025)
- [Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11967/) (2025)
- [ReSum: Unlocking Long-Horizon Search Intelligence via Context Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13313/) (2025)
- [UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22034/) (2025)
- [Learning to Clarify: Multi-turn Conversations with Action-Based Contrastive Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00222/) (2024)
- [RECAP: REwriting Conversations for Intent Understanding in Agentic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04472/) (2025)
- [AI Agents Need Memory Control Over More Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11653/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Natural-Language Agent Harnesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25723/) (2026)
- [SWE-MeM: Learning Adaptive Memory Management for Long-Horizon Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28434/) (2026)
- [HarnessBank: Semantic Gene-Bank Search with Gated Verification for Agent-Harness Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13683/) (2026)
- [See, Remember, Explore: A Benchmark and Baselines for Streaming Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23864/) (2026)
- [ContextPilot: Teaching Agents for Proactive Context Management via Fine-grained RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28476/) (2026)
- [Intent-Driven Situation Tracking for User-Centric Multi-Turn Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15755/) (2026)
- [ARSM: Auto-Regressive State Machine for Agentic Reasoning Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32852/) (2026)
- [DeLoop: Repeated Actions as Self-Supervision for Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19376/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have been successfully deployed in many tool-augmented settings, but their scalability is fundamentally constrained by context length. Existing context-folding methods mitigate this issue by summarizing past interactions, yet they are typically designed for single-query or single-intent scenarios. In more realistic user-centric dialogues, we identify two major failure modes: (i) they irreversibly discard fine-grained constraints and intermediate facts that are crucial for later decisions, and (ii) their summaries fail to track evolving user intent, leading to omissions and erroneous actions. To address these limitations, we propose U-Fold, a dynamic context-folding framework tailored to user-centric tasks. U-Fold retains the full user--agent dialogue and tool-call history but, at each turn, uses two core components to produce an intent-aware, evolving dialogue summary and a compact, task-relevant tool log. Extensive experiments on τ-bench, τ2-bench, VitaBench, and harder context-inflated settings show that U-Fold consistently outperforms ReAct (achieving a 71.4% win rate in long-context settings) and prior folding baselines (with improvements of up to 27.0%), particularly on long, noisy, multi-turn tasks. Our study demonstrates that U-Fold is a promising step toward transferring context-management techniques from single-query benchmarks to realistic user-centric applications.