Research Aide– DSL – Ding, Peng – 4.10.26

Argonne National Laboratory•Lemont, IL

2d•$31 - $47

About The Position

Ctxweave is a pluggable context and artifact management library for AI agent systems. As large language model (LLM) agents tackle increasingly complex, long-running tasks, they face critical challenges in managing their finite context windows — including unbounded context growth, attention degradation (the "lost-in-the-middle" effect), and signal dilution from irrelevant tokens — while simultaneously struggling to maintain coherent workspace state across the artifacts they produce. ctxweave addresses these challenges by modeling agent context as a version-controlled directed acyclic graph (DAG), inspired by Git's commit-tree architecture. Each atomic context unit is typed (e.g., instruction, observation, tool call/result, state), enabling a type-aware merge registry that applies content-specific compaction and conflict resolution strategies, a significant improvement over the naive sliding-window or LLM-summarization approaches used by existing frameworks. Beyond context management, ctxweave provides unified artifact and workspace lifecycle management, tracking file mutations, dependency relationships, and workspace snapshots as first-class entities within the DAG. The framework is designed to support both single-agent and multi-agent scenarios, enabling context forking, parallel workspace isolation, and structured merging when agents collaborate or hand off work. Built as a zero-dependency library rather than a standalone framework, ctxweave is intended for integration into production agent platforms to deliver structured, reversible context compaction, artifact-aware history management, and seamless multi-agent coordination. Education and Experience Requirements The entirety of the appointment must be conducted within the United States. Applicants must be: o Currently enrolled in undergraduate or graduate studies at an accredited institution. o Graduated from an accredited institution within the past 3 months; or o Actively enrolled in a graduate program at an accredited institution. Must be 18 years or older at the time the appointment begins. Must possess a cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale. If accepting an offer, candidates may be required to complete pre-employment drug testing based on appointment length. All students remain subject to applicable drug testing policies. Must complete a satisfactory background check.

Requirements

Currently enrolled in undergraduate or graduate studies at an accredited institution.
Graduated from an accredited institution within the past 3 months; or
Actively enrolled in a graduate program at an accredited institution.
Must be 18 years or older at the time the appointment begins.
Must possess a cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale.
Must complete a satisfactory background check.