Out of Sight: Compression-Aware Content Protection against Agentic Crawlers
On the map: LLM reasoning → Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning
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Abstract (arXiv)
The rise of LLM-based agents with reasoning, summarization, and memory capabilities has created a new threat surface for online content that conventional defenses fail to address. Existing defenses like access controls can be circumvented by agents mimicking ordinary browsers, and injection-based defenses often degrade human readability. In this paper, we revisit the agent pipeline and identify context compression, which agents routinely invoke to fit context budgets, as a critical yet overlooked defense layer. We propose CAPE, a framework that protects high-value textual content by injecting invisible perturbations without changing its human-visible surface form, thereby inducing severe information loss during agent compression. CAPE extracts disruptive seed perturbations from an accessible surrogate compressor, then adapts them to query-only target compressors through prior-guided evolution and preference-calibrated candidate prioritization, achieving effective protection under a low query budget. Experiments on three content types and four compression settings show that CAPE improves information loss by up to 75.8% over the strongest baseline while keeping protected content visually indistinguishable from originals. CAPE also transfers to real-world settings, including the LangGraph agent workflow and GitHub Copilot, highlighting its generality and practical value. This paper aims to reveal context compression as a new defense layer, promoting content protection research in the agent era.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 32 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.
Builds on
32 of 63 references.
References · 32
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- 2024Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Researchcited by 483
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- 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Basescited by 429
20 more
- 2020Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summariescited by 378
- 2023Adapting Language Models to Compress Contextscited by 356
- 2024LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compressioncited by 348
- 2023RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentationcited by 256
- 2024BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystackcited by 215
- 2025Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM Agentscited by 158
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- 2024Typos that Broke the RAG's Back: Genetic Attack on RAG Pipeline by Simulating Documents in the Wild via Low-level Perturbationscited by 65
- 2024CompAct: Compressing Retrieved Documents Actively for Question Answeringcited by 64
- 2023Compressed Context Memory For Online Language Model Interactioncited by 43
- 2024Glitch Tokens in Large Language Models: Categorization Taxonomy and Effective Detectioncited by 29
- 2024Stress-Testing Long-Context Language Models with Lifelong ICL and Task Haystackcited by 19
- 2025T1: A Tool-Oriented Conversational Dataset for Multi-Turn Agentic Planningcited by 14
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- 2024Towards Operationalizing Right to Data Protectioncited by 3
- 2025Web Intellectual Property at Risk: Preventing Unauthorized Real-Time Retrieval by Large Language Modelscited by 3
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- 2026Relevance as a Vulnerability: How Web Retrieval Degrades Safety Alignment in LLM Agents
- 2026Prismata: Confining Cross-Site Prompt Injection in Web Agents
- 2026Untrusted Content Masking for Web Agents with Security Guarantees
- 2025FocusAgent: Simple Yet Effective Ways of Trimming the Large Context of Web Agents
- 2026Backdoor in the Loop: Compromising Agentic Search via Malicious Retrievers
- 2024ExpShield: Safeguarding Web Text from Unauthorized Crawling and LLM Exploitation
- 2026Safe to Check, Unsafe to Use: Relinking at the Compression Boundary of LLM Agents