mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Fix the Structural Bottleneck: Context Compression via Explicit Information Transmission

arXiv 2602.03784 ↗First posted 3 Feb 2026cs.CLcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems

also in 1 more
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

  1. 2016SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Textcited by 4,115
  2. 2021The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuningcited by 3,769
  3. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  4. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
  5. 2017TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehensioncited by 2,895
  6. 2013Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distancescited by 2,277
  7. 2018FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERificationcited by 1,362
  8. 2018Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarizationcited by 1,308
  9. 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 449
  10. 2023LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compressioncited by 443
  11. 2023Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokenscited by 379
  12. 2023Adapting Language Models to Compress Contextscited by 350
24 more
  1. 2024LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compressioncited by 343
  2. 2025Layer by Layer: Uncovering Hidden Representations in Language Modelscited by 293
  3. 2024Long-context LLMs Struggle with Long In-context Learningcited by 285
  4. 2024DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Headscited by 283
  5. 2021QuALITY: Question Answering with Long Input Texts, Yes!cited by 204
  6. 2022Recurrent Memory Transformercited by 197
  7. 2023In-context Autoencoder for Context Compression in a Large Language Modelcited by 190
  8. 2023Compressing Context to Enhance Inference Efficiency of Large Language Modelscited by 185
  9. 2019MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehensioncited by 183
  10. 2024A Comprehensive Study of Knowledge Editing for Large Language Modelscited by 157
  11. 2024xRAG: Extreme Context Compression for Retrieval-augmented Generation with One Tokencited by 123
  12. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modelingcited by 113
  13. 2024Long Context Compression with Activation Beaconcited by 101
  14. 2022Prompt Compression and Contrastive Conditioning for Controllability and Toxicity Reduction in Language Modelscited by 96
  15. 2023SlimPajama-DC: Understanding Data Combinations for LLM Trainingcited by 72
  16. 2024Prompt Compression for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 65
  17. 2024DenseFormer: Enhancing Information Flow in Transformers via Depth Weighted Averagingcited by 48
  18. 2024500xCompressor: Generalized Prompt Compression for Large Language Modelscited by 45
  19. 2024A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compressioncited by 15
  20. 2025Autoencoding-Free Context Compression for LLMs via Contextual Semantic Anchorscited by 14
  21. 2026COMI: Coarse-to-fine Context Compression via Marginal Information Gaincited by 13
  22. 2024Position IDs Matter: An Enhanced Position Layout for Efficient Context Compression in Large Language Modelscited by 9
  23. 2025UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compressioncited by 8
  24. 2025EFPC: Towards Efficient and Flexible Prompt Compressioncited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Can Compressed LLMs Truly Act? An Empirical Evaluation of Agentic Capabilities in LLM Compression
  2. 2024QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory
  3. 2025Beyond Hard and Soft: Hybrid Context Compression for Balancing Local and Global Information Retention
  4. 2026When Less is More: The LLM Scaling Paradox in Context Compression
  5. 2026FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents
  6. 2025ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents
  7. 2026AGORA: Adapter-Grounded Observation-Action Retention for Inference-Free Prompt Compression in LLM Agents
  8. 2026ATACompressor: Adaptive Task-Aware Compression for Efficient Long-Context Processing in LLMs