Jin Shang
Author directory2026
TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents
Buqiang Xu | Zirui Xue | Dianmou Chen | Chenyang Fu | Chiyu Wu | Caiying Huang | Chen Jiang | Jizhan Fang | Xinle Deng | Yijun Chen | Yunzhi Yao | Xuehai Wang | Jin Shang | Huajun Chen | Ningyu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Buqiang Xu | Zirui Xue | Dianmou Chen | Chenyang Fu | Chiyu Wu | Caiying Huang | Chen Jiang | Jizhan Fang | Xinle Deng | Yijun Chen | Yunzhi Yao | Xuehai Wang | Jin Shang | Huajun Chen | Ningyu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present **TokenPilot**, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, *Ingestion-Aware Compaction* acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, *Lifecycle-Aware Eviction* monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on ‘PinchBench‘ and ‘Claw-Eval‘ under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by **61%** and **56%** in isolated mode, and **61%** and **87%** in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems.
When Should Models Change Their Minds? Contextual Belief Management in Large Language Models
Haoming Xu | Weihong Xu | Zongrui Li | Mengru Wang | Yunzhi Yao | Chiyu Wu | Jin Shang | Yu Gong | Shumin Deng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haoming Xu | Weihong Xu | Zongrui Li | Mengru Wang | Yunzhi Yao | Chiyu Wu | Jin Shang | Yu Gong | Shumin Deng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-horizon interactions require language models to manage accumulating information: when to update their state, when to preserve their state, and what to ignore. We study this challenge as Contextual Belief Management (CBM): maintaining a predicted belief state aligned with formal evidence while isolating task-irrelevant noise. To make CBM measurable, we introduce , a closed-world benchmark spanning Rule Discovery and Circuit Diagnosis, where a finite belief space and symbolic verifiers enable exact turn-level evaluation. diagnoses three failures: Failed Stay, Failed Update, and Failed Isolation. Across multiple LLMs, vanilla models exhibit severe CBM failures, while explicit belief-tracking prompts provide limited gains. In contrast, reinforcement learning with belief-state rewards reduces failure rates by 70.9% on average. Further probing reveals latent belief-state dynamics behind these failures, and representation-level steering reduces failure rates by 46.1% across two tasks.