Beyond the Context Window: Scaling Agentic RL via End-to-end Optimized Context Compression
Miao Lu Stanford University, Weiwei Sun Carnegie Mellon University, Weihua Du Carnegie Mellon University, Zhan Ling ByteDance Inc., Xuesong Yao ByteDance Inc., Kang Liu ByteDance Inc., Jiecao Chen ByteDance Inc.
We study reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use, where context length quickly becomes a fundamental bottleneck. Existing multi-turn RL pipelines suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and most importantly, strict context limits. In this work, to address these challenges, we introduce summarization-based context management to training. In specific, it periodically compresses the tool using history by LLM-generated summaries that retain task-relevant information to keep a compact context while enabling the agent to scale beyond the fixed context window. Building on this formulation, we derive a policy gradient representation that seamlessly enables standard LLM RL infrastructures to optimize both tool-use behaviors as well as summarization strategies in an end-to-end fashion. We instantiate this framework with SUmmarization augmented Policy Optimization (SUPO), an LLM RL algorithm that enables long-horizon training beyond a fixed context limit. Experiments on interactive function calling and searching tasks demonstrate that SUPO significantly improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines. We also demonstrate that for complex searching tasks SUPO can further improve the evaluation performance when scaling test-time maximum round of summarization beyond that of training time.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表