Plans Fade Fast: Why Context Management Is Load-Bearing for LLM Agents
Context managers summarize or evict old messages so agents can operate beyond a finite window. This creates a reliability problem: removing history that still shapes the model's computation may change later actions, while retaining everything defeats compression. We study plans because agents create them early and are expected to use them later, yet behavioral success alone cannot reveal whether later calls still depend on the plan exchange. We make four contributions. First, we introduce replay pairing, which holds the action-observation trajectory fixed and compares pre-action hidden states with and without the plan exchange. We show that, on Llama-3.1-70B in ALFWorld, the mean contrast...
| Authors | Aman Mehta, Anupam Datta |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 22 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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