# ContextWeaver: Selective and Dependency-Structured Memory Construction for LLM Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16741/) (2024)
- [Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09687/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08467/) (2023)
- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03091/) (2023)
- [Long-context LLMs Struggle with Long In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02060/) (2024)
- [Compressing Context to Enhance Inference Efficiency of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06201/) (2023)
- [ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00615/) (2025)
- [The Complexity Trap: Simple Observation Masking Is as Efficient as LLM Summarization for Agent Context Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21433/) (2025)
- [The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03690/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ECHO: Prune To Act, Trace To Learn With Selective Turn Memory In Agentic RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31650/) (2026)
- [Blast Radius](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07440/) (2026)
- [Compress What You See, Not What You Say: Anchored Context Distillation for Latent-Observation Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31430/) (2026)
- [Persistent Context Graphs for Efficient Memory Compaction in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40118/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents often struggle in long-context interactions. As the history grows, sliding windows and prompt compression may drop earlier information that later steps rely on. Retrieval-based memory systems surface relevant content but still overlook the causal and logical dependencies between steps. We introduce ContextWeaver, a selective and dependency-structured memory framework that organizes an agent's interaction trace into a graph of reasoning steps and selects the relevant context for future actions. ContextWeaver supports (1) dependency-based construction and traversal that link each step to the earlier steps it relies on; (2) compact dependency summaries of the reasoning paths; and (3) a lightweight validation layer that incorporates execution feedback. On five software-engineering and terminal benchmarks with a fixed budget per task, ContextWeaver improves the resolve rate over a sliding-window baseline on all five, with a significant gain when pooled across benchmarks, while using 13-18% fewer agent steps. It also performs favorably against alternative context-management approaches, with the largest gains on long-horizon repository tasks. On SWE-Bench Pro, ContextWeaver raises the resolve rate from 66.5% to 72.6%, with significant improvements across all three model backbones. The improvement also holds when the sliding window's budget is raised to cover the summary cost.