How Much Conversation History Does an AI Agent Need?

Danny Kim, Fernando Koch

How does using less conversational history change reader-token use and benchmark scores? We examine this question on 1,100 BEAM questions. We held the retrieval ranking and reader constant across five fixed passage budgets, and mean assigned scores rose as the passage budget grew. The score gain per additional token became smaller at the upper tested budgets. Answerable questions generally received higher scores with more context. Pooled abstention scores sometimes rose as the passage budget shrank. We also tested message retention in a controlled task with explicit conversational-state targets and compared retained user messages with token-matched recency. Qwen matched the full state more often for direct requirements when user messages were retained. Its full-state matching declined when answers depended on references to earlier offers. Mistral produced near-floor results across the retention conditions. A scoring audit leaves the correctness of BEAM answers unresolved. These experiments characterize the token and score consequences of the tested memory budgets. Reliable budget selection depends on retaining the evidence each question requires and validating the measure used to…