[
    {
        "id": "osp-15493",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "title": "Does an Agent's History Tell You When Compaction Will Hurt? A Modest, Bounded Effect on the TRACE Paired-Replay Corpus",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Pakhomov",
                "given": "Egor"
            },
            {
                "family": "Nijkamp",
                "given": "Erik"
            }
        ],
        "URL": "https://omanscience.com/en/articles/does-an-agent-s-history-tell-you-when-compaction-will-hurt-a-modest-bounded-effect-on-the-trace-paired-replay-corpus",
        "language": "en",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    2026
                ]
            ]
        },
        "abstract": "Many long-horizon agents compact their context on a global rule, usually a token budget, blind to what the agent was doing. We ask whether the agent's recent behaviour predicts when a compaction will hurt. TRACE's public corpus of 590 harness-triggered AppWorld compaction boundaries replays each boundary from a re-executed prefix state under the pre-compaction context and under the summary, and records the burden of the next actions: calls that error or repeat a call already made. We find that pre-boundary history predicts post-compaction harm only weakly. An internally prespecified contrast by prefix placement is a wide null, and the naive \"has-written\" label behind it turns out to measure trajectory phase. The best extension-protocol trigger reaches held-out AUROC 0.66 (0.64 on the replicate's own label) against a same-boundary replicate of 0.72; the best frozen, interpretable trigger avoids 21% of harmful (positive-burden) boundaries while keeping 84% of compaction opportunities, and exceeds the random-rule expectation on count but not on burden mass (a post hoc comparison). Whether the best trigger beats a token-budget rule at matched retention cannot be evaluated on the release. We state what corpora should ship to answer it."
    }
]