AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Management

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ye, Rui, Zhang, Zhongwang, Li, Kuan, Yin, Huifeng, Tao, Zhengwei, Zhao, Yida, Su, Liangcai, Zhang, Liwen, Qiao, Zile, Wang, Xinyu, Xie, Pengjun, Huang, Fei, Chen, Siheng, Zhou, Jingren, Jiang, Yong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ye, Rui
Zhang, Zhongwang
Li, Kuan
Yin, Huifeng
Tao, Zhengwei
Zhao, Yida
Su, Liangcai
Zhang, Liwen
Qiao, Zile
Wang, Xinyu
Xie, Pengjun
Huang, Fei
Chen, Siheng
Zhou, Jingren
Jiang, Yong
author_facet Ye, Rui
Zhang, Zhongwang
Li, Kuan
Yin, Huifeng
Tao, Zhengwei
Zhao, Yida
Su, Liangcai
Zhang, Liwen
Qiao, Zile
Wang, Xinyu
Xie, Pengjun
Huang, Fei
Chen, Siheng
Zhou, Jingren
Jiang, Yong
contents LLM-based web agents show immense promise for information seeking, yet their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks is hindered by a fundamental trade-off in context management. Prevailing ReAct-based agents suffer from context saturation as they accumulate noisy, raw histories, while methods that fixedly summarize the full history at each step risk the irreversible loss of critical details. Addressing these, we introduce AgentFold, a novel agent paradigm centered on proactive context management, inspired by the human cognitive process of retrospective consolidation. AgentFold treats its context as a dynamic cognitive workspace to be actively sculpted, rather than a passive log to be filled. At each step, it learns to execute a `folding' operation, which manages its historical trajectory at multiple scales: it can perform granular condensations to preserve vital, fine-grained details, or deep consolidations to abstract away entire multi-step sub-tasks. The results on prominent benchmarks are striking: with simple supervised fine-tuning (without continual pre-training or RL), our AgentFold-30B-A3B agent achieves 36.2% on BrowseComp and 47.3% on BrowseComp-ZH. Notably, this performance not only surpasses or matches open-source models of a dramatically larger scale, such as the DeepSeek-V3.1-671B-A37B, but also surpasses leading proprietary agents like OpenAI's o4-mini.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_24699
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Management
Ye, Rui
Zhang, Zhongwang
Li, Kuan
Yin, Huifeng
Tao, Zhengwei
Zhao, Yida
Su, Liangcai
Zhang, Liwen
Qiao, Zile
Wang, Xinyu
Xie, Pengjun
Huang, Fei
Chen, Siheng
Zhou, Jingren
Jiang, Yong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
LLM-based web agents show immense promise for information seeking, yet their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks is hindered by a fundamental trade-off in context management. Prevailing ReAct-based agents suffer from context saturation as they accumulate noisy, raw histories, while methods that fixedly summarize the full history at each step risk the irreversible loss of critical details. Addressing these, we introduce AgentFold, a novel agent paradigm centered on proactive context management, inspired by the human cognitive process of retrospective consolidation. AgentFold treats its context as a dynamic cognitive workspace to be actively sculpted, rather than a passive log to be filled. At each step, it learns to execute a `folding' operation, which manages its historical trajectory at multiple scales: it can perform granular condensations to preserve vital, fine-grained details, or deep consolidations to abstract away entire multi-step sub-tasks. The results on prominent benchmarks are striking: with simple supervised fine-tuning (without continual pre-training or RL), our AgentFold-30B-A3B agent achieves 36.2% on BrowseComp and 47.3% on BrowseComp-ZH. Notably, this performance not only surpasses or matches open-source models of a dramatically larger scale, such as the DeepSeek-V3.1-671B-A37B, but also surpasses leading proprietary agents like OpenAI's o4-mini.
title AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Management
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24699