Abstract
RAMPART is a compile-time memory model and pure in-RAM block registry for LLM-based agents. Context assembly is a programmable runtime operation where content is compiled from a structured registry under explicit policy for ordering, inclusion, and eviction. Five composable primitives (promote, gate, write, evict, rollback) act on named addressable blocks before compilation at zero prompt-token cost. Provenance tags and non-evictable authorship flags implement a permissioned memory model with block-level ownership. Controlled probes with Qwen3-8B Q4 show that compile-time placement and the structural relationship between blocks and the task query affect task success, with the cliff falling at roughly the seventh block position when the task follows the registry and the twelfth when it precedes. Grouping the critical block with content-adjacent neighbours and promoting the group as a unit lifts task success by tens of percentage points at positions where single-block placement fails. Cross-model replication on Qwen2.5-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, and Qwen3-14B shows the content-priming effect appears at the same absolute positions across families, with magnitude varying with model strength. Block grouping raises Mistral's mean pass rate roughly fivefold at the hardest registry size, and a smaller model with the intervention can outperform a larger model without it in the mid-registry zone. Relevance gating reduces prompt cost by 67.8% while recovering 83% of the promoted-condition success rate. Schema eviction produces 0% invocations against 100% with the schema present, a property policy-based approaches cannot guarantee by construction. Shared-registry coordination reduces inter-agent communication to a method call at zero coordination token cost.
Explore similar work
Jun 14, 2026cs.CL
Where an LLM sits in an agent memory pipeline -- between the recall plane that retrieves stored facts (extensively benchmarked) and the control plane that mutates them via supersede, release, purge (largely untested) -- shapes which forgetting failure modes the system recovers. Comparing thirteen system configurations on a 385-case adversarial surface, we observe three placement regimes with partly complementary coverage: deterministic primitives suffice for lexical/temporal categories but fail canonicalization (5% on identifier-obfuscation, 0% on cross-lingual); inscribe-time LLM recovers canonicalization (100%) but cannot help intent-aware deletion (0% on prefix-collision and compound-fact); a mutation-time hook recovers intent-aware deletion (78-85%) and brightens nearly all categories simultaneously (91.7-93.2% overall, $0.17 per 385-case run, 2.3s/case mutation latency vs. 64-191ms/case deterministic, recall path unchanged). We expose the trade-off via ForgetEval, a 1000-case templated suite plus a 385-case adversarial layer (132 hand-crafted + 253 LLM-drafted oracle-validated) scored by deterministic substring match, paired with a six-method Adapter Protocol with honest N/A scoring that lets heterogeneous memory stores enter in 130 lines. Admission is corroborated by 10-annotator IAA (Fleiss' kappa = 0.958) and a 77-case external-authored subset (four blind contributors) that replicates the canonicalization asymmetry and amplifies the joint-placement lift (+27.8 pt). Production failures are predominantly forgetting failures rather than recall failures, yet existing benchmarks measure only recall. ForgetEval and all adapters are released under MIT.
Dongxu Yang
Jul 15, 2026cs.CL
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks. Yet nearly all existing approaches, from graph-structured memories to reflective insight stores, access memory through fixed, hand-designed heuristics. We argue that this static view of memory is a core bottleneck for agentic learning because optimal memory behavior is fundamentally context-dependent. The early stages of the tasks, benefit from minimal retrieval because memory is sparse; recurring goal types benefit from plan reuse rather than generic nearest-neighbor lookup; stuck agents benefit from re-retrieval with alternative queries; and across long task streams, the memory store itself must be consolidated and pruned to remain useful. We present Memory as a Controlled Process (MemCon), a framework that models memory operations as a Markov Decision Process and learns an online policy that adaptively decides when, what, and how much to retrieve, when to inject a distilled plan, and when to consolidate or forget. MemCon is backend-agnostic: it wraps any existing memory implementation, learns from task-by-task binary feedback with no pretraining and no additional LLM calls, and uses a lightweight tabular contextual bandit with UCB exploration that converges within tens of tasks. Across 6 benchmarks, 3 agent frameworks, and 3 LLM backbones, MemCon consistently outperforms multiple memory baselines by up to 15.2 points in task success while reducing token consumption by 5--20%.
Eric Hanchen Jiang, Zhi Zhang, Yuchen Wu +11
May 5, 2026cs.MA
Modern language agents must operate over long-horizon, multi-turn histories, yet deploying such agents with Small Language Models (SLMs) remains fundamentally difficult. Full-context prompting causes context overflow, flat retrieval exposes the model to noisy evidence, and open-ended agentic loops are unreliable under limited reasoning capacity. We argue that a substantial portion of SLM memory failure arises from mismatched memory operations: different query types demand categorically different retrieval strategies, evidence transformations, and context budgets that SLMs cannot reliably self-orchestrate through open-ended reasoning. We introduce MemFlow, a training-free memory orchestration framework that externalizes memory planning from the SLM. A Router Agent classifies each query by intent and dispatches it to the Memory Agent, which executes one of three specialized tiers (Profile Lookup, Targeted Retrieval, or Deep Reasoning) and assembles the resulting evidence under a dynamic, tier-aware token budget. An Answer Agent then generates a response from this compact context, and a Validator Agent optionally retries with a heavier memory tier when the response is not supported by the provided evidence. This route-then-compile design avoids tool-selection hallucination and reasoning loops while keeping the answer context compact. Evaluated on a frozen Qwen3-1.7B backbone across long-horizon memory benchmarks - LongMemEval, LoCoMo, and LongBench - MemFlow improves accuracy by nearly 2x over full-context SLM baselines. These results suggest that structured intent routing and deterministic evidence preparation can make limited-capacity models substantially more effective in resource-constrained long-horizon agents.
Jiayi Chen, Yingcong Li, Guiling Wang