The Compaction Half-Life: Measuring Fact Survival Under Iterated Context Summarization

Yash Singh - IIIT Una

A pre-registered empirical study of how planted facts decay when an LLM agent repeatedly compacts its context via summarize-and-continue. Facts decay with a half-life of roughly one compaction round; a 2.7x larger summary budget does not significantly help, while a one-line verbatim-preservation instruction yields 100 percent retention. Includes the full reproducible harness and raw data.

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