5× context compression did surprisingly little to GPT-5.5’s final task result.
The compressed agent remained statistically as successful as the full-context version.
What changed was how it got there: it relied much more heavily on retrieval to reconstruct dropped information.
– arxiv. org/abs/2608.16370
Title: "What Does Context Compression Cost an Agent? Interaction Costs Unrevealed by Task-Completion Metrics"