Abstract
Context compaction lets long-horizon coding agents continue beyond their context windows, but can erase the state needed to finish a task. Prior evaluations measure efficiency, retained information, or end-to-end success, leaving the effect of a specific history replacement difficult to isolate. Compact-Bench pairs full-history and summary-only continuations from a shared repository state, and evaluates recurring details and successive production compactions. It covers 35 SWE-bench repairs, 146 agentic sessions, and 106 production chains. Across 14 summarizer backbones, stable damage ranges from 5-64% of 22 full-history successes: Claude Opus 4.8 preserves the most repairs, while DeepSeek-Flash damages the most. With Kimi-K3 as summarizer, the Kimi Code prompt preserves the most task continuations (19/22), whereas Claude Code retains the most recurring details (15.0%). LLM summaries retain at most 16.0% of recurring details, compared with 79.1% for mechanical extraction; production summaries retain 15.7% at the first boundary. Failures recur across methods: one repair is damaged by 13/14 backbones, and another by all 5 prompts. These results show that reliable compaction requires preserving the progress needed to complete a task, and that retaining relevant information alone does not ensure successful continuation. Code is available at this https URL and data is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31710
