The Compaction Cliff in Long-Running AI Agent Memory
A safety rule and an episodic log compete for the same tokens in an AI agent's context. When the budget overflows, both are summarized at the same rate; only the rule needs exact wording to remain enforceable. On 20 production agent configurations, Claude Code's /compact prompt on Sonnet 4.6 preserves 53\% of safety rules after one compaction round and 10\% after five. We name this the Compaction Cliff. We address it with Knowledge Triage, a framework that classifies each line of an agent's knowledge base by type and routes each type through its own retention policy. Three deterministic operators implement this triage across the three context-management operations: TypeCompact rewrites it...
| Authors | Saber Zerhoudi, Jelena Mitrovic, Michael Granitzer |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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