ACE: Pluggable Adaptive Context Elasticizer across Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
Abstract (arXiv)
The increasing complexity of agentic tasks has led to rapidly growing trajectory lengths, which poses significant challenges for large language model (LLM) based agents with fixed context windows. Existing context management techniques, such as truncation and summarization, suffer from inherent inflexibility and irreversibility: once information is discarded or compressed, it cannot be recovered even when it becomes critically relevant in later decision steps. To address these limitations, we propose the Adaptive Context Elasticizer (ACE), a plug-and-play module that elastically orchestrates historical step information into the agent's context at each decision step. ACE maintains a lossless message maintenance layer that stores both raw messages and compressed abstractions for each historical step, while a context orchestration layer adaptively assigns each step an elastic type as raw, abstract, or drop, at every decision step based on the current task state. This reversible design ensures that the main LLM always receives a compact yet information-rich context. We adapt ACE to four diverse agent frameworks, including ReAct, DeepAgent, WebThinker, and MiroFlow, without training or architectural modifications. Experiments show that ACE consistently outperforms truncation and summarization baselines, and brings consistent performance gains across all four agent frameworks.
Key facts. Cited by 2 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 44 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.
Builds on
44 of 47 references.
Closest ancestors · 13
Same direction, newest first
- 2026GenericAgent: A Token-Efficient Self-Evolving LLM Agent via Contextual Information Density Maximization (V1.0)18 Apr
- 2026AutoAgent: Evolving Cognition and Elastic Memory Orchestration for Adaptive Agents10 Mar
- 2026Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents:Mechanisms, Evaluation, and Emerging Frontiers8 Mar
- 2026ARC: Active and Reflection-driven Context Management for Long-Horizon Information Seeking Agents17 Jan
- 2026MemoBrain: Executive Memory as an Agentic Brain for Reasoning12 Jan
- 2025Memory in the Age of AI Agents15 Dec
- 2025AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Management28 Oct
- 2025Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks14 Oct
- 2025Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding13 Oct
- 2025ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents1 Oct
- 2025ReSum: Unlocking Long-Horizon Search Intelligence via Context Summarization16 Sep
- 2025MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents18 Jun
Other references · 31
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
- 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,455
- 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
- 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
- 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,745
- 2020Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequencescited by 1,684
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
- 2023LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understandingcited by 1,417
- 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
19 more
- 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
- 2023Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolationcited by 740
- 2023YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Modelscited by 601
- 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 587
- 2025Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligencecited by 567
- 2025LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversationcited by 429
- 2025Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attentioncited by 407
- 2025WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capabilitycited by 335
- 2025MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agentcited by 246
- 2025WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agentcited by 229
- 2025WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversalcited by 175
- 2025BrowseComp-ZH: Benchmarking Web Browsing Ability of Large Language Models in Chinesecited by 145
- 2025xbench: Tracking Agents Productivity Scaling with Profession-Aligned Real-World Evaluationscited by 120
- 2025DeepAgent: A General Reasoning Agent with Scalable Toolsetscited by 71
- 2026The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World Intelligencecited by 61
- 2025LongCat-Flash Technical Reportcited by 58
- 2026MiroThinker-1.7 & H1: Towards Heavy-Duty Research Agents via Verificationcited by 32
- 2025IterResearch: Rethinking Long-Horizon Agents with Interaction Scalingcited by 23
- 2026MiroFlow: Towards High-Performance and Robust Open-Source Agent Framework for General Deep Research Taskscited by 15
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
- 2026LongSeeker: Elastic Context Orchestration for Long-Horizon Search Agents
- 2026Learning Agent-Compatible Context Management for Long-Horizon Tasks
- 2026ACM: Agentic Context Management for Long Horizon Tasks
- 2026ContextPilot: Teaching Agents for Proactive Context Management via Fine-grained RL
- 2026AgentSwing: Adaptive Parallel Context Management Routing for Long-Horizon Web Agents
- 2026Toward Reliable Context Compression for Long-Horizon Agents: An Empirical Study of Execution Instability
- 2025Difficulty-Aware Agentic Orchestration for Query-Specific Multi-Agent Workflows