Fix the Structural Bottleneck: Context Compression via Explicit Information Transmission
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
Abstract (arXiv)
Long-context LLM agents often struggle with growing token, memory, and latency costs, making efficient context compression essential for practical deployment. Existing LLM-as-a-compressor methods remain noticeably inferior to using the full context. We find that this gap partly stems from their inability to preserve contextual information effectively. In this work, we revisit context compression from a structural perspective and identify two key bottlenecks in standard LLM-based compressors: limited coordination among compression tokens during information aggregation, and layerwise dilution that weakens useful signals from intermediate hidden states. To address these limitations, we propose ComprExIT, a new context compression framework based on explicit information transmission. ComprExIT adaptively selects features across frozen LLM layers, then allocates information from anchors to compression slots through a globally coordinated transport plan. Experiments on 12 datasets show that ComprExIT consistently outperforms strong soft-compression baselines, improving average F1 by up to 18.5%, while adding only ~1% trainable parameters and achieving more than 2x faster compression than the fastest baselines. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.
Builds on
36 of 47 references.
References · 36
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24 more
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
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- 2026When Less is More: The LLM Scaling Paradox in Context Compression
- 2026FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents
- 2025ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents
- 2026AGORA: Adapter-Grounded Observation-Action Retention for Inference-Free Prompt Compression in LLM Agents
- 2026ATACompressor: Adaptive Task-Aware Compression for Efficient Long-Context Processing in LLMs