Neural Paging: Learning Context Management Policies for Turing-Complete Agents
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 Neural Paging, a hierarchical architecture that decouples symbolic reasoning from information resource management. We formulate the Context Paging Problem (CPP) and propose a lightweight, differentiable 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~K, Neural Paging reduces the asymptotic complexity of long-horizon reasoning from quadratic O(N2) to O(N · K2), 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.
Turn this paper into a lesson
ArcXiv compiles a structured reading guide from this paper's metadata: plain-English importance, contributions, prerequisite concepts, which sections to read first, flashcards, and a quiz. Grounded in the abstract, never invented.