Beyond Context Windows: Persistent Discovery Context for Data-Centric Agents
Jalal Mahmud
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
Data-centric agents repeatedly perform a discovery step before planning or execution: identifying the data objects relevant to a task. Yet successful discovery outcomes are typically discarded rather than reused. We introduce persistent discovery context, a lightweight memory layer that stores prior intent-to-object mappings and reuses them to augment future retrieval. Across three structured data environments, persistent discovery context consistently improves retrieval quality over metadata-only search, remains effective with automatically generated memories, and exposes a reproducible interference failure mode. In lexically sparse domains, memory-only retrieval can even outperform metadata-based retrieval. These findings suggest that discovery outcomes constitute a useful form of reusable context for data-centric agents.
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.
Empirically, PRISM reduces the end-to-end time for data selection and model tuning to just 30% of conventional pipelines, and achieves this efficiency while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across eight multimodal and three language understanding benchmarks.
Jinhe Bi, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan et al.· arXiv.org· 73 citations· ⚡4
The method, ECCOLA, is presented, which aims at making the high-level AI ethics principles more practical, making it possible for developers to more easily implement them in practice.
Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, P. Abrahamsson· EUROMICRO Conference on Soft...· 64 citations· ⚡6
This paper designs Markov decision processes (MDPs) for different combinatorial problems and proposes to train conditional GFlowNets to sample from the solution space and demonstrates that GFlowNet policies can efficiently find high-quality solutions.
Dinghuai Zhang, H. Dai, Esmeralda S. Whitammer et al.· Advances in Neural Informati...· 59 citations· ⚡8
An empirical study on the current state of practice in artificial intelligence ethics is conducted by means of a multiple case study of five case companies, which indicates a gap between research and practice in the area.
Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Joni Kultanen et al.· arXiv.org· 56 citations· ⚡6
