Context Compaction Theory: first formal proof linking agent compaction to communication complexity
lateinteraction · x · 2026-09-06
Inspired by a January comment from @lateinteraction, a new arXiv paper formalizes context compaction — the ubiquitous but unanalyzed process agents use to fit state into bounded context windows. It introduces two games (Context Selection and Context Generation), proves the Generation Game is equivalent to one-way communication complexity (so known lower bounds transfer directly), shows Selection maps to a restricted protocol class, and proves there exist query sets where generation strictly beats selection.
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