In plain words: Instead of outside code deciding what stays in memory, the model treats its context as a file it can freely edit. On a hard web-search task it beat the best outside strategies with 11.4% higher accuracy while using 21.5% less computing.
Abstract
We introduce Context Language Models (CLMs), language models that natively manage their own context. We implement this by treating the context as a file and allowing the model to make unrestricted updates to this file. This allows the model to learn what is most important to maintain in context, and naturally extends to multi-agent systems where multiple agent contexts coexist as files. Building CLMs zero-shot with existing models outperforms SOTA context management strategies across a variety of tasks: 11.4% higher accuracy with 21.5% fewer FLOPs on BrowseComp-Plus, 5% higher scores with 59% fewer FLOPs on 12-hour EdgeBench, and 65% greater improvement with the same compute on a 24-hour multi-repository agent-swarm task. Moreover, by shifting context management from external harness control to intrinsic model behavior, CLMs naturally enable both in-context and parametric learning of context-management strategies. We show that CLMs can be steered with natural-language instructions evolved through a standard skill-optimization loop, improving held-out accuracy by up to 35.9 points on a context-management task while reducing compute. We also introduce an online reinforcement learning method for CLMs, improving Qwen3.5-9B performance on BrowseComp-Plus by 47.6% while using 12% fewer FLOPs. Finally, we co-design Suffix Cache Reuse for CLM serving, further reducing server-side compute by 35% relative to standard SGLang at matched performance.
Rulin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Junjie Oscar Yin, Yuetai Li, Minheng Wang, Hamish Ivison, Radha Poovendran, Nathan Lambert, Teng Xiao, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, et al.
arXiv:2609.37725 · cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Sep 29, 2026
abstract · pdf · html
Introducing Context Language Models (CLMs) - Natively manage their own context - Treat context as a file - Learn policies in CLM weights, no harness
Check out our paper, code, and play with CLM! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.37725 Code: github.com/facebookresearch/context-language-models HF paper: huggingface.co/papers/2609.37725