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Neural Paging: Learning Context Management Policies for Turing-Complete Agents

Machine Learning 2026-03-04 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The proof that Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with external read-write memory constitute a computationally universal system has established the theoretical foundation for general-purpose agents. However, existing implementations face a critical bottleneck: the finite and costly Context Window, which functions not as infinite memory but as a scarce semantic cache. In this work, we introduce \textit{Neural Paging}, a hierarchical architecture that decouples symbolic reasoning from information resource management. We formulate the \textit{Context Paging Problem (CPP)} and propose a lightweight, differentiable \textit{Page Controller} designed to approximate ``Semantic Belady's Optimality'' -- retaining tokens with high future utility under explicit assumptions on access patterns. We provide theoretical analysis showing that, under bounded context window size~KK, Neural Paging reduces the asymptotic complexity of long-horizon reasoning from quadratic O(N2)O(N^2) to O(NK2)O(N \cdot K^2), and we derive a robustness bound (Theorem~4) that quantifies competitive-ratio degradation under policy-dependent access with bounded sensitivity. We validate these bounds on synthetic paging traces, confirming that the theoretical guarantees hold and identifying significant slack that motivates learned policies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.02228,
  title  = {Neural Paging: Learning Context Management Policies for Turing-Complete Agents},
  author = {Liang Chen and Qi Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02228},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:59:48.049Z