Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding

Weiwei Sun, Miao Lu, Zhan Ling, Kang Liu, Xuesong Yao, Yiming Yang, Jiecao Chen

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are fundamentally constrained by context length on long-horizon tasks. We introduce Context-Folding, a framework that empowers agents to actively manage their working context. An agent can procedurally branch into a sub-trajectory to handle a subtask and then fold it upon completion, collapsing the intermediate steps while retaining a concise summary of the outcome. To make this behavior learnable, we develop an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework FoldGRPO with specific process rewards to encourage effective task decomposition and context management. On complex long-horizon tasks (Deep Research and SWE), our folding agent matches or outperforms the ReAct baselines while using an active context 10$\times$ smaller and significantly outperforms models that rely on summarization-based context management.

External IDs:dblp:journals/corr/abs-2510-11967