Agentsensus: Consensus-Compressed Shared Memory for Multi-Agent Story Worlds
Organizations: University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Abstract
A agentic story world is a dynamic system simulating who learned what, when, and from whom -- yet the standard design gives each character a private memory stream. A shared event is therefore stored once per witness, large duplication will be incurred in terms of storage. We present Agentsensus, a story-world simulation framework in which there is an unified long-term memory. Records of the same event merge into one owned by all its witnesses, and semantically relevant memory records are linked. We evaluate on four worlds -- two classical Chinese novels, Hamlet, and a real-world conflict timeline -- run for 40 to 80 rounds against three per-character memory designs under an equal-granularity protocol. Agentsensus writes 22-44% fewer entries than the closest baseline and is the only design whose memory becomes shared (14-28% of records held by more than one character, some by 10) and linked (94-99%), at judged simulation quality indistinguishable or even better than the baselines. An ablation attributes this to the merge itself: disabling it multiplies the store by 3.1x and takes sharing to exactly zero. Sharing also compounds with the horizon rather than saturating early, rising 6% to 9% to 14% as one world is re-run at 10, 20 and 40 rounds.
Figures & tables
| Backend | Sediment | Sim | Total |
| Three Kingdoms — fiction, 80 rounds, 6,052 source events | |||
| Consensus | 6,051 | 974 | 7,025 |
| Gen. Agents | 20,896 | 1,251 | 22,147 |
| G-Memory | 27,156 | 1,434 | 28,590 |
| Collaborative | 19,856 | 1,455 | 21,311 |
| Red Chamber — fiction, 80 rounds, 6,506 source events | |||
| World | Sim entries | Shared (multi-owner) | Linked (affiliated) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three Kingdoms (80r) | 974 | 185 (19%) | 945 (97%) |
| Red Chamber (80r) | 438 | 105 (24%) | 412 (94%) |
| Russia–Ukraine (40r) | 814 | 114 (14%) | 806 (99%) |
| Hamlet (40r) | 130 | 36 (28%) | 127 (98%) |
| Merge | Cache | Store | Sim | Shared | Linked | Grnd | Traj | Narr | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| on | fifo (published) | 6,590 | 539 | 19% | 93% | 0.92 | 0.89 | 4.17 | 0.97 |
| on | relevance | 6,674 | 623 | 21% | 96% | 0.93 | 0.83 | 4.33 | 0.99 |
| on | hybrid | 6,670 | 619 | 18% | 96% | 0.94 | 0.90 | 4.25 | 0.98 |
| off | fifo | 20,669 | 813 | 0% | 94% | 0.92 | 0.82 | 4.00 | 0.96 |
Appendix figures & tables18 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| recall | affiliated | keep-shorter | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| World | rows | hits+exp. | amp. | q in hits | q in exp. | 1 4+ own. | seen | chars | name | principal | |
| Three Kingdoms | 7,025 | 51 | 5+27 | 6.6 | 25% | 9% | 8 13 | 60/447 | 4 | 30% | 15% |
| Red Chamber | 6,944 | 19 | 5+35 | 8.7 | 32% | 9% | 4 19 | 43/267 | 5 | 37% | 7% |
| Russia–Ukraine | 2,347 | 41 | 5+1 | 1.6 | 10% | 0% | 7 1 | 37/314 | 20 | 22% | 14% |
| Hamlet | 1,265 | 3 | 5+40 | 8.8 | 0% | 0% | 2 26 | 7/74 | 9 | 29% | 14% |
| Action | Consensus | Gen. Agents | G-Memory | Collaborative |
| Three Kingdoms | ||||
| say | 66 | 50 | 48 | 61 |
| read_thread | 123 | 110 | 83 | 121 |
| observe | 28 | 34 | 31 | 37 |
| move | 2 | 1 | 4 | 1 |
| act_on | 11 | 14 | 23 | 22 |
| World | Rounds | Scenes | Beats | Speakers | Places | English | Source lang. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three Kingdoms | 0–79 | 54 | 312 | 33 | 24 | 206k | 62k (zh) |
| Red Chamber | 0–79 | 62 | 390 | 34 | 26 | 98k | 30k (zh) |
| Russia–Ukraine | 0–39 | 48 | 334 | 47 | 20 | 313k | – (en) |
| Hamlet | 0–39 | 12 | 117 | 16 | 6 | 49k | – (en) |
| World | Registry | Events | Calls | Tokens | Wall | Active | Archived | Envs | Carriers | Warn |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three Kingdoms | 399 | 6,052 | 764 | 9.2M | 124 min | 33 | 38 | 115 | 5 | 235 |
| Red Chamber | 152 | 6,506 | 848 | 8.5M | 129 min | 34 | 3 | 88 | 9 | 222 |
| Russia–Ukraine | 170 | 1,533 | 1,373 | 12.3M | 69 min | 47 | 14 | 71 | 0 | 61 |
| Hamlet | 22 | 1,135 | 212 | 0.9M | 31 min | 16 | 2 | 8 | 3 | 10 |
| World | Sim entries | Shared | 3+ | Max | Linked | Expanded | Linked/call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three Kingdoms (80r) | 974 | 185 (19%) | 38 | 6 | 97% | 51/51 | 28 |
| Red Chamber (80r) | 438 | 105 (24%) | 24 | 6 | 94% | 19/19 | 38 |
| Russia–Ukraine (40r) | 814 | 114 (14%) | 23 | 10 | 99% | 23/41 | 5 |
| Hamlet (40r) | 130 | 36 (28%) | 2 | 3 | 98% | 3/3 | 39 |
| World | Backend | Grounding | Trajectory | Narrative | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three Kingdoms | Consensus | 0.88 0.02 | 0.87 0.02 | 4.08 0.12 | 0.98 0.00 |
| Gen. Agents | 0.93 0.01 | 0.82 0.02 | 4.00 0.00 | 0.99 0.00 | |
| G-Memory | 0.88 0.01 | 0.87 0.01 | 3.83 0.12 | 0.99 0.00 | |
| Collaborative | 0.89 0.02 | 0.89 0.01 | 3.92 0.12 | 0.97 0.01 | |
| Red Chamber | Consensus | 0.92 0.02 | 0.86 0.02 | 4.00 0.00 | 0.98 0.01 |
| Gen. Agents | 0.88 0.04 | 0.87 0.02 | 4.25 0.00 | 0.98 0.01 |
Agent Memory Management
Agent memory management studies how AI agents store, update, retrieve, compress, and forget information across long-running tasks.
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