2603.00054 Long-Context Prediction for LLM Agents: Token Budgeting, Positional Extrapolation, and Memory Systems
Long-context capability is increasingly the limiting factor for LLM-based agents that must plan, search, debug, and maintain state over hours-to-days of interaction. “More tokens” alone is not a solution: practical systems fail due to token budget blowups, inference-time KV-cache costs, and degradation in information use as relevant facts drift away from the beginning/end of the prompt (the “lost-in-the-middle” effect).