Paper Detail
Xiaozhe Li, Tianyi Lyu, Yizhao Yang, Liang Shan, Siyi Yang, Ligao Zhang, Zhuoyi Huang, Qingwen Liu, Yang Li
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a symbiotic framework that decouples context management from task execution. Our architecture pairs a lightweight, specialized policy model, ContextCurator, with a powerful frozen foundation model, TaskExecutor. Trained via reinforcement learning, ContextCurator actively reduces information entropy in the working memory. It aggressively prunes environmental noise while preserving reasoning anchors, that is, sparse data points that are critical for future deductions. On WebArena, our framework improves the success rate of Gemini-3.0-flash from 36.4% to 41.2% while reducing token consumption by 8.8% (from 47.4K to 43.3K). On DeepSearch, it achieves a 57.1% success rate, compared with 53.9%, while reducing token consumption by a factor of 8. Remarkably, a 7B ContextCurator matches the context management performance of GPT-4o, providing a scalable and computationally efficient paradigm for autonomous long-horizon agents.
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@article{li2026escaping,
title = {Escaping the Context Bottleneck: Active Context Curation for LLM Agents via Reinforcement Learning},
author = {Xiaozhe Li and Tianyi Lyu and Yizhao Yang and Liang Shan and Siyi Yang and Ligao Zhang and Zhuoyi Huang and Qingwen Liu and Yang Li},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a symbiotic framework that decouples context management from task execution. Our architecture pairs a lightweight, specialized policy model, ContextCurator, with a powerful frozen foundation model, TaskExecutor. Trained via reinfo},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11462},
keywords = {cs.AI},
eprint = {2604.11462},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}