# Realize What Matters: Principled Context Representation for Large-Scale Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27173/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01030/) (2024)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05366/) (2025)
- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02259/) (2025)
- [From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14802/) (2025)
- [QuALITY: Question Answering with Long Input Texts, Yes!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08608/) (2021)
- [A Human-Inspired Reading Agent with Gist Memory of Very Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09727/) (2024)
- [Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17419/) (2024)
- [Recursive Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24601/) (2025)
- [StructRAG: Boosting Knowledge Intensive Reasoning of LLMs via Inference-time Hybrid Information Structurization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08815/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10150/) (2025)
- [Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05242/) (2026)
- [Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16660/) (2025)
- [A-RAG: Scaling Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Hierarchical Retrieval Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03442/) (2026)
- [You Don't Need Pre-built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06105/) (2025)
- [Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03315/) (2026)
- [TPS-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents' Tool Planning & Scheduling Abilities in Compounding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01527/) (2025)
- [CorpusQA: A 10 Million Token Benchmark for Corpus-Level Analysis and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14952/) (2026)
- [Structure-R1: Dynamically Leveraging Structural Knowledge in LLM Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15191/) (2025)
- [Thucy: An LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Claim Verification across Relational Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03278/) (2025)
- [ClaimDB: A Fact Verification Benchmark over Large Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14698/) (2026)
- [Finding What Matters: Anchoring Context Knowledge with Evolving Indices for Iterative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16462/) (2026)
- [InfoGatherer: Principled Information Seeking via Evidence Retrieval and Strategic Questioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05909/) (2026)
- [Deep Reasoning in General Purpose Agents via Structured Meta-Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Solving complex tasks in domains such as science, medicine, law, and finance often requires assembling interdependent information scattered across vast, heterogeneous sources far beyond model context limits. Existing approaches tackle this challenge by organizing information into more manageable representations over which models can reason, such as graphs, textual memories, and retrieval collections. These representations dictate what downstream reasoning is possible and, ultimately, whether it succeeds; yet their design and construction remain largely ad hoc. In this work, drawing on the cognitive theory of relevance realization, we propose concrete principles for designing AI systems that construct effective representations of very large contexts. We analyze existing approaches and show how their successes and failures can be explained by their alignment with these principles, and introduce R3Con, a harness that systematically operationalizes them. We evaluate R3Con against nine state-of-the-art baselines on two recent benchmarks of reasoning over large document corpora. On these benchmarks, R3Con substantially outperforms the strongest baseline, by 20 and 8.4 percentage points. It also enables smaller models to outperform much larger ones: R3Con with 4B and 9B models outperforms all evaluated 35B baselines, while R3Con with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B outperforms Claude Code with Claude-Sonnet-5 at 3.7× lower cost. Our results show that context representations following our principled approach can reduce reliance on model scale, pointing toward a future of AI systems with frontier-level performance powered by smaller models.