Contextual Memory Virtualisation: DAG-Based State Management and Structurally Lossless Trimming for LLM Agents
Organizations: Imperial College London
Abstract
As large language models engage in extended reasoning tasks, they accumulate significant state -- architectural mappings, trade-off decisions, codebase conventions -- within the context window. This understanding is lost when sessions reach context limits and undergo lossy compaction. We propose Contextual Memory Virtualisation (CMV), a system that treats accumulated LLM understanding as version-controlled state. Borrowing from operating system virtual memory, CMV models session history as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) with formally defined snapshot, branch, and trim primitives that enable context reuse across independent parallel sessions. We introduce a three-pass structurally lossless trimming algorithm that preserves every user message and assistant response verbatim while reducing token counts by a mean of 20% and up to 86% for sessions with significant overhead by stripping mechanical bloat such as raw tool outputs, base64 images, and metadata. A single-user case-study evaluation across 76 real-world coding sessions demonstrates that trimming remains economically viable under prompt caching, with the strongest gains in mixed tool-use sessions, which average 39% reduction and reach break-even within 10 turns. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/IngressionLabs/contextual-memory-virtualisation.
Figures & tables
| Model | Base Input | Cache Write | Cache Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opus 4.6 | $5.00 | $6.25 | $0.50 |
| Metric | Min | Median | Mean | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Token reduction (%) | 0 | 12 | 20 | 86 |
| Cache miss penalty ($) | 0.02 | 0.32 | 0.30 | 0.82 |
| Break-even (turns, Opus 4.6) | 1 | 38 | 35 | 60 |
| Bloat Profile | Sessions | Mean Red. | Median Red. | Mean Break-even | Mean Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixed ( 15%) | 12 | 39% | 33% | 10 turns | 97k |
| Conversational ( 15%) | 64 | 17% | 10% | 40 turns | 82k |
| All sessions | 76 | 20% | 12% | 35 turns | 84k |
LLM Context Management
Large language model context management studies how to select, compress, retrieve, and organize information within bounded model inputs.
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