Agent Memory Management

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56 papers in the last four weeks, up 229% on the four weeks before. 0.6% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 308

Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

Hierarchical Graph Memory for LLM Agents with Path-level Localization and Rewrite

Agents for long term reasoning require a memory that can be efficiently and effectively updated over time, as new facts and external feedback continue to arrive. Recently, graph memory has been adopted to offer structural organization for multi-hop retrieval and reasoning. However, existing methods store all memories in a flat graph, and accumulated historical memories can introduce irrelevant contexts and increase the cost of evidence selection during retrieval. Moreover, they typically update memory units independently, requiring repeated unit-wise rewrite to cover related changes. To address these issues, we propose HiGram, an evolving hierarchical graph memory framework with path-level localization and rewriting. Specifically, we first propose a hierarchical graph memory, which organizes the memory into coarse-to-fine architecture composed of upper-level nodes and MemoryUnits, thereby reducing the amount of irrelevant information during retrieval. We further propose MicroGraph-based path-level localization, which leverages query and update conditioned MicroGraphs to identify support subgraph and evidence path before rewrite. Finally, we propose a coordinated rewriting method that jointly revises intra-unit memory and inter-unit dependencies, enable valid dependency structures updating in the localized evidence path. Experiments on benchmarks for long-term conversational question answering and conflict-aware memory evaluation demonstrate that our method demonstrate substantial improvements over baselines in answer quality and token efficiency. Besides, our method improves answer accuracy and query-valid evidence selection under dynamic, static, and conditional conflicts.

Xiawei Yue, Boran Wang, Xiaoqing Zhang +2

Nankai University, Tianjin, China · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China · Beihang University, Beijing, China

LLM Agent Memory Graph-Based Agent Memory Hierarchical Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

Caching for the Future: Scrub Jay Episodic Memory Principles for Agent Memory Systems

LLM agents that persist across sessions accumulate stored memories whose validity varies enormously by content type, yet existing memory architectures treat all memories as equally persistent and systematically contaminate retrieved context with outdated facts. We show that per-memory, type-conditioned temporal decay, a property of western scrub jay episodic memory, can be operationalized as an auto-classified coefficient

π_i

in an external LLM-agent memory store, yielding ScrubJay-MEM: each memory is encoded as a jointly-bound What--Where--When tuple with an estimated perishability

π_i

and utility horizon

τ_i

, retrieved by query-adaptive scoring, and revised retroactively at

O(1)

LLM calls per update. We introduce the Temporal Generalization Test (TGT), a benchmark with held-out retention intervals and a Generalization Gap (GenGap) metric. On TGT, ScrubJay-MEM is the only retrieval-based system with substantially positive GenGap (

+0.108

); on MemoryAgentBench EventQA-64k it improves F1 by

+2.66

over Mem0 and

+3.09

over Qwen3-Embedding-4B under a llm backbone. A decay ablation collapses GenGap by

5.7\times

, establishing type-conditioned decay as necessary for the result. Gains narrow under stronger backbones and reverse on fact-consolidation tasks, scoping the contribution to temporal reasoning over perishable facts.

Kartikey Singh Bhandari, Aarya Wadhwani, Dhruv Kumar +1

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

Temporal IR Episodic Memory Memory Agent Benchmarks Agent Memory Management

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

FocusMem: Factorizing Content, Readout, and Trust in Latent GUI Memory

GUI agents must remember both useful experience from earlier tasks and unfinished progress in the current interaction. Latent memory offers a compact solution by compressing multimodal trajectories into a few continuous tokens. Existing methods, however, usually map each trajectory to one fixed memory block and train it mainly through next-action supervision. This creates three practical problems: important details may be lost during compression, the same memory block must serve different decision stages, and irrelevant retrieved trajectories may still mislead the agent. We introduce FocusMem, which separates these responsibilities within a compact latent-memory interface. A role-aware content basis encourages episodic memory to retain reusable experience and working memory to retain task progress. A state-conditioned readout generates a decision-specific view of the same stored evidence, while a lightweight trust gate can suppress memory blocks that appear irrelevant to the current step. All components are trained while the GUI policy remains frozen. Across five GUI-agent benchmarks, FocusMem consistently outperforms a fully matched action-only fixed-memory baseline and prior latent memory adaptations. Further analysis shows that semantic and functional supervision preserve complementary information, state-conditioned readout is more robust as surrounding trajectory context grows, and the trust gate reduces the harm caused by injected irrelevant episodic evidence. These results show that effective latent memory depends not only on compressing past interaction, but also on what is retained, what is exposed, and what is allowed.

Zhuoran Zhang, Bowen Li, Jingcheng Ju +5

School of Computer Science, Peking University · 2Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies, Peking University · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences +1

GUI Agents Episodic Memory Memory-Augmented Agents Agent Memory Management

Aug 4, 2026cs.SE

EA-Graph: Artifact-Anchored Verification Memory for Coding Agents under Upstream Drift

Coding agents increasingly work across sessions, but prose notes can preserve a conclusion without the program state that supported it. After an upstream change, a repository may still build even though earlier verification claims are no longer valid. EA-Graph is an artifact-anchored memory for verification claims. It represents artifacts at sub-path granularity, resolves aliases to leaf definitions, anchors each claim to the content used to establish it, and keeps evidence strength separate from freshness. When replacement content is unavailable, the claim becomes unprovable rather than guessed. EA-Graph is evaluated on generated repositories whose behavior-to-artifact ground truth is known by construction. The task is to classify prior claims as unaffected, affected, or unprovable after value drift, logic drift, and deliberately withheld upstream content. The analysis covers 42 sessions across seven clean worlds, 14 model-world instances, three memory conditions, and two model tiers. In the Haiku round, artifact-anchored memory outscored prose notes and no persistent memory in all seven worlds; each exact paired Wilcoxon comparison yielded p = 0.0156. In the Sonnet round, the anchored condition was perfect, but frequent control ceilings left the preregistered contrasts non-significant. No session fabricated withheld content. These results support a bounded claim: artifact-anchored memory improved the smaller model's provability judgments in this testbed. An exploratory comparison further suggests that structured claim memory may narrow a capability gap by externalizing in-session re-derivation, but it does not establish cross- model equivalence. The study makes no claim about efficiency or repair quality.

Hwai-Jung Hsu, Cheng-Jan Chi, Hanna Everett

Sustainable and Peer Education Center, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University · Office of AI Affairs, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Agent Memory Software Engineering Agents Memory Agent Benchmarks Agent Memory Management

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

TARL: Transaction-Aware Reliable Ledgers for Executable Memory Management in Long-Term Agents

Persistent memory helps long-term agents retain knowledge, yet a single update error can repeatedly distort future retrieval and reasoning. Most existing systems reduce memory updating to a binary Write/Hold decision, which cannot distinguish whether new information should be added, ignored, used to revise an outdated belief, rejected as unreliable, or deferred for verification. These choices may share the same binary label while producing fundamentally different memory states. We introduce TARL, a memory state update framework that maps each statement to one of five executable actions. TARL identifies the affected memory, resolves its temporal scope, compares source reliability, and updates accepted, pending, and rejected ledgers. It is further trained by comparing the memory states produced by alternative update operations, encouraging the model to select the operation that leads to the correct result. We also introduce TARL-Mem, a benchmark with fine-grained action labels and next-state targets. Across in-domain, cross-source, temporal, counterfactual, and sequential evaluations, TARL improves action prediction and state recovery, reduces memory pollution, preserves conflicting evidence, and limits cumulative corruption.

Han Xiao, Hongjun Xu, Xin Zhang +2

School of Informatics, Xiamen University

LLM Agent Memory Memory Agent Benchmarks Agent Memory Management

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

LeanMem: Simple and Efficient Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for LLM-based agents to sustain interactions and reliably leverage distant history. However, existing memory systems typically process heterogeneous dialogue content through a uniform summarization and retrieval pipeline, leading to either excessive token consumption or irreversible loss of fine-grained evidence. We argue that historical dialogue content should be handled differently according to its compressibility, temporal dynamics, and fidelity requirements. Based on this insight, we propose LeanMem, a lightweight long-term memory framework. LeanMem first filters out low-value content, then stores informative segments as compact profile memory, temporally structured event memory, or source-grounded record memory, depending on the nature of the information. During maintenance, only dynamically evolving event memories are selectively updated, avoiding redundant consolidation of stable profiles and immutable records. During inference, LeanMem dynamically selects memory types and allocates retrieval budgets according to query-specific evidence demands, assembling relevant evidence on demand. On LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S with GPT-4.1-mini and Qwen3-8B, LeanMem improves accuracy over the strongest memory-based baseline in every setting, by up to 15.1 points, at the lowest or near-lowest construction cost, inference tokens, and latency. The code and datasets are included in the supplementary materials.

Yuxin Liao, Le Wu, Min Hou +3

Hefei University of Technology

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Verifiable Memory: Learning Unified Memory Management with Local and Global Verifiers for Large Language Model Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents must retain reusable information, control a bounded active context, and recover earlier evidence during long-horizon interaction. Existing methods commonly optimize long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) separately, while unified policies are often trained primarily with trajectory-level feedback, which provides weak credit for individual memory decisions. We present Verifiable Memory (VerMem), a framework that represents LTM, active context, and episodic history as distinct states and controls them with one memory operation policy. Seven atomic operations let the policy add, revise, or soft-delete LTM entries; retrieve LTM into the active context; filter or summarize the active context; and restore selected episodic fragments. VerMem is initialized by supervised fine-tuning and trained with a three-stage reinforcement-learning curriculum. The local verifier scores executable memory transitions, and a global verifier assesses evidence coherence and terminal-memory consistency after task completion. These scores are combined with programmatically computed task, evidence-recall, efficiency, and constraint signals through hierarchical credit assignment. The verifiers are used only during training. Across five benchmarks and two LLM backbones, VerMem achieves the best result on the vast majority of reported metrics and consistently outperforms strong memory baselines. Under controlled online-token budgets on three interactive benchmarks, it also achieves the strongest efficiency--performance frontier among the compared methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Sun-SYSU-24/VerMem.

Xiaolong Sun, Qichao Wang, Hangyu Li +1

Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Tencent, Shenzhen, China

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Agent Memory Management RL for LLM Agents

Aug 3, 2026cs.CR

MutMem: Cryptographically Authorized Mutation in Persistent Agent Memory

Persistent agent memory must adapt as later outcomes change earlier evidence, yet mutable retrieval weights create an attribution problem: reviewers must distinguish authorized adaptation from database tampering. We present MutMem, an authorized-mutation protocol in HOM-AIMOS, a persistent agent-memory engine. MutMem retains memory content, records signed positive and negative outcome evidence without age-based expiry, and commits each nontrivial weight change as a housekeeper-authorized transition. Each transition binds a terminal provenance node, signer epoch, quantized old and new weights, a no-fork predecessor, and two domain-separated SHA-256 commitments. Ed25519 verification runs in both the database writer and a portable verifier. Content classified as poison-likely is retained with signed, revisable labels used by recall as trust evidence. We evaluate utility, mutation integrity, and poisoning adaptation. HOM-AIMOS answers 459/500 LongMemEval questions correctly under LLM judgment (91.8%). On LoCoMo, it obtains 74.12% judged accuracy and, under a separate upstream-compatible protocol, 58.20 token F1. A native suite passes all declared authorization, topology, tamper, signer-epoch, and post-mutation-recall cases; median signed-transition latency is 4.865 ms. In a declared N=100 PoisonedRAG adaptation, no injected poison appears in attacked top-5 disclosures (0/100; 95% Wilson upper bound 3.70%), while induced target-answer attack success among 98 clean-negative targets is 1/98 (1.02%). A preregistered four-arm ablation attributes the retrieval reduction to signed stored labels: the retriever selects poison for 94/100 targets when epistemic policy is bypassed and 0/100 when labels are restored. MutMem provides evidence of integrity, authorization, traceability, and historical continuity; it does not establish content truth.

Walid Saidi

Independent researcher

LLM Agent Memory Agent Memory Poisoning Tamper-Evident Logging Agent Memory Management

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

EvoGraph-Mem: Failure-Aware Editable Graph Memory for Long-Term Language Agents

Long-term memory is essential for language agents operating across extended interactions and evolving tasks. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly focus on storing and retrieving past experience, but the quality of stored memories may degrade over time. In particular, previously distilled insights can become outdated, over-generalized, or harmful under new task contexts, causing memory pollution when repeatedly reused. To address this issue, we study insight-level memory maintenance for long-term language agents and propose a failure-aware memory maintenance framework based on an editable insight graph. Each insight node tracks positive evidence, negative evidence, and an activation state, enabling the agent to distinguish reusable insights from conflicting or invalid ones. We further introduce a utility-aware retrieval mechanism and a graph controller that updates the memory graph after task execution by keeping reliable insights, archiving invalid ones, revising outdated ones, and adding newly discovered reusable insights. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms representative memory-based agent baselines across different backbone models. Ablation studies further demonstrate that append-only memory is insufficient for long-horizon tasks, while evidence-aware retrieval and graph-level editing improve memory reliability and downstream task performance.

Yuxi Qian, Yuxiang Ren

Agent Memory Graph-Based Agent Memory Long-Horizon Agent Tasks Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

MemArbiter: Decision-Time Memory Arbitration for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents must retain and use cross-step information to act coherently in long-horizon tasks. Existing methods improve memory accessibility, yet action-relevant information may still fail to guide the current decision because it is poorly formed, organized, prioritized, or presented. We call this post-access failure the Memory-Action Gap. We propose MemArbiter, a function-aware memory arbitration framework that addresses the memory-management-induced component of this gap. MemArbiter decomposes interaction histories into atomic items, organizes them into five functional Memory Banks, and combines bank-level demand, item-level relevance, focal-ambient representations, and a temporal presentation gate to dynamically control memory salience. We evaluate MemArbiter on ALFWorld against Flat Retrieval and Flat Recency under unified per-step memory budgets. With an open-weight action-generation model, MemArbiter achieves success rates of 82.8% and 92.5% under 500- and 750-token budgets, outperforming the strongest baseline by 20.9 and 25.4 percentage points, respectively. It also improves post-failure recovery and reduces failed-action repetition and state-action recurrence. These results show that function-aware memory arbitration enables accessible information to guide actions more effectively.

Jiajun Dong, Yutao Hu, Fengrui Fan +3

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China · Fudan University, China

LLM Agent Memory Long-Horizon LLM Agents Agent Memory Management

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

MemSIF: From Structured Interactions to Dual-Track Fact Memory for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is critical for LLM agents operating over long-horizon interactions. However, several persistent limitations of existing memory systems can be traced to two recurring misalignment patterns in long-term interaction settings: Temporal-Structural Misalignment (TSM) and Delayed Utility Manifestation (DUM). TSM arises when temporal proximity does not reliably align with topical or event-level relatedness, whereas DUM arises when write-time salience does not reliably predict future query utility. To mitigate these misalignment patterns, we propose MemSIF (Memory with Structured Interactions and Facts), a structured interaction-to-fact memory framework. Structured Interaction Memory organizes raw interactions into Topical Segments that preserve local topical coherence and Event Trajectories that maintain cross-time event continuity. Dual-Track Fact Memory uses two complementary tracks: CoreFact memory consolidates stable, schema-guided information at write time, whereas ActiveFact memory forms facts on demand and promotes those supported by multiple historical sources and recurring query demand for reuse. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S across five backbone LLMs show that MemSIF achieves the highest Total ACC in all settings, outperforming the strongest baseline by 2.29%-8.79% on LoCoMo and 2.87%-6.15% on LongMemEval-S. These results support the effectiveness of combining Structured Interaction Memory with Dual-Track Fact Memory to mitigate TSM and DUM. Code is available at https://github.com/luoyufeihaha/MemSIF.

YuFei Luo, Xiucheng Xu, Zhen Yang

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

LLM Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Aug 3, 2026cs.CL

PGMem: Tightly Coupled Persona-Memory Graph for Lifelong Personalized Agents

Long-term personalized dialogue agents must track user preferences as their personas evolve. Existing memory systems organize past events well, but store personas as flat profiles detached from the events that justify them. This loose coupling leads to the memory-persona validity gap and the persona-aware retrieval gap. We propose PGMem, a heterogeneous persona-memory graph that connects event and persona nodes through typed provenance and evidence edges, keeping each persona signal traceable to the events that support or revise it. At retrieval time, PGMem expands from query-relevant seeds and ranks signals by evidential validity. Across three benchmarks with small language model backbones, PGMem consistently outperforms summary-based, persona-aware, graph-structured, and agentic memory baselines, and improves performance as the context grows. The source code of PGMem is available at https://github.com/wonjunchoi23/pgmem/

Wonjun Choi, Yerim Kim, Yukyung Lee +1

Korea University, Seoul, Korea · Boston University, Boston, USA

Agent Memory LLM Personalization Persistent Memory for Language Models Graph-Based Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Conversational Agents+1

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

When Memory Updates but Behavior Does Not: Repairing Implicit Stale Dependencies in Personalized Agent Responses

Memory-augmented agents can know that a user's stored state is outdated and still plan around the old value. The STALE benchmark calls this the implicit policy adaptation (IPA) gap. We identify one structural contributor: draft-anchored verification checks what a response says, and in an open-ended response the stale dependency is usually unsaid. StateAuditor therefore audits in the opposite direction, from stored state to draft. An LLM proposes candidate old-to-new transitions from timestamped evidence; deterministic code pins each quotation to a single entry, checks that the new evidence really is newer, and lets only these verified transitions trigger repair. What is verified is provenance and chronology - not semantic supersession. On STALE's full protocol (400 scenarios, 50-session histories, one independent response per query), strict single-query VTA scores .736 against .686 for our locked predecessor under the same judge: a +5.0-point paired gain (95% CI [+2.9, +7.2]) coming almost entirely from IPA and premise resistance (PR). The benchmark's own judge, from a third model family, reproduces the gain (.738 vs. .680). On an independent cross-family preference-evolution benchmark (HorizonBench), the full draft-audit-repair pipeline over a gold-derived structured store raises current-preference accuracy (user-clustered p<.01), though a matched control shows most of this external gain is the draft-side audit itself; a harder authored lifecycle set gives no gain, bounding the claim while false invalidation stays controlled. On STALE, by contrast, a matched control (same evidence, adapter, and call budget) scores only .692 (+0.6 over the predecessor, n.s.), attributing the STALE gain to the transition machinery rather than added context or calls. We make no claim about general-purpose agent memory.

Haofei Sun, Lin He

The University of Texas at Arlington · The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

LLM Agent Memory Memory Agent Benchmarks Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Aug 2, 2026cs.LG

Stop When Memory Suffices: Evidence-Conditioned Progressive Execution for LLM Agents

The continued development of LLMs toward persistent and adaptive intelligence increasingly requires long-term memory mechanisms that preserve and reuse information across interactions. Existing memory systems either compress and structure histories for efficient access or perform deep research over broader trajectories. The former lowers online cost but may omit temporal, causal, or cross-step dependencies, while the latter improves evidence coverage at substantial latency and inference cost. This raises a key question: can a memory system achieve strong answer quality while maintaining low online latency? We introduce Router-Mem, an evidence-conditioned progressive execution framework for long-horizon agent memory. Router-Mem first applies a shared low-cost retrieval prefix to obtain evidence. A lightweight sufficiency router then predicts whether the context supports early termination, which enable a single-token decision at inference time. It is trained with evidence-level supervision and rationale-conditioned representation distillation. When evidence is insufficient, Router-Mem reuses retrieval hits to expand memory blocks and perform deeper analysis and aggregation. Experiments on AMA-Bench and BEAM show that Router-Mem achieves 55.17% and 38.77% score while reducing average inference time by 27.3% and 25.5% compared with full memory execution.

Yidan Lin, Kaixiang Wang, Jiong Lou +1

LLM Inference Efficiency Efficient Inference LLM Agent Memory Long-Horizon LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Early-Exit Neural Networks

Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

TrajWiki: Source-Grounded Memory Trajectories for Long-Horizon Dialogue Agents

Large language model agents have shown strong capabilities in generating coherent and contextually appropriate responses, yet robust long-horizon dialogue remains limited by the lack of external memory that is traceable, updatable, and diagnostically transparent. Existing memory-augmented agents often store memories as isolated records or overwritable states, making it difficult to preserve how information originates, evolves, conflicts, or becomes obsolete over time. We propose TrajWiki, a trajectory-based memory framework for long-horizon conversational agents. Instead of treating memory as static entries, TrajWiki represents each memory as a source-grounded evolution trajectory, maintained through immutable episodic snapshots and claim-level operations such as ADD, REVISE, and DEPRECATE. To reduce fragmentation and retrieval cost, TrajWiki further introduces Memory Wiki, a persistent intermediate layer that incrementally compiles dialogue history into structured and interlinked wiki pages capturing salient entities, events, quantities, topics, and conflicts. At inference time, queries are routed hierarchically from relevant wiki pages to linked memory trajectories, then to corresponding snapshots and source messages for evidence-grounded answer synthesis. Experiments on LoCoMo and MedMT show that TrajWiki improves long-horizon dialogue performance across both open-source and closed-source LLM backbones, while providing greater interpretability and diagnostic visibility into memory evolution, retrieval failures, and answer generation.

Jingyu Sun, Yuyang Xue, Mingyang Li +9

1The University of Manchester · 2The University of Melbourne · 3The University of Edinburgh +2

Agent Memory LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Long-Horizon LLM Agents Agent Memory Management

Aug 1, 2026cs.MA

MAPLE-Guard: Memory-Aware Link Enforcement Against Memory-Link Poisoning in Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) increasingly rely on persistent private and shared memories for long-horizon coordination. This memory layer improves continuity, but it also gives attackers a durable channel: a poisoned memory can be written once, continuously retrieved in later tasks, promoted into shared memory, and reused by other agents. A single poisoned write can therefore steer many later decisions and contaminate agents that never saw the original attack, all while no malicious message crosses a visible communication edge at the moment of harm. Further, because existing safeguards mainly inspect prompts, actions, or communication edges, they can miss attacks whose content appears benign at write time but becomes harmful after retrieval. We introduce Memory-Aware Propagation and Link Enforcement Guard, MAPLE-Guard, a memory-link guard for memory-enabled MAS. MAPLE-Guard monitors the memory lifecycle and places gates at write, retrieval, promotion, and cross-agent reuse, so risky memories can be quarantined, unsafe retrievals filtered, and poisoned private memories blocked before they enter shared memory. In the main evaluation, MAPLE-Guard lowers attack success rate (ASR) from 38.2% to 0.9% on LongMemEval and from 34.7% to 0.2% on AppWorld; it also raises multi-agent defense success rate (MDSR) from 54.0% to 74.3% and from 42.5% to 99.8% on the same benchmarks. These results suggest that memory-aware link enforcement covers a gap left by prompt-level and topology-level defenses. Code is available at the link: https://github.com/xiong-wenjun/MAPLE-Guard.

Wenjun Xiong, Yijin Zhou, Jiaqian Wang +6

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Xidian University +2

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Agent Memory Poisoning Multi-Agent System Security Agent Memory Management Shared-Memory Multi-Agent Systems

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

CrystalMem: Elastic Memory for Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Knowledge Crystallization

Memory for self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents is often provisioned as if its byte budget only grows. Cloud platforms, however, adjust quotas with load and cost, and we show that capability does not follow the budget back up: after a squeeze-and-recover cycle, the agent settles below its pre-squeeze level, a gap we call memory hysteresis. The cause is structural. Deletion and one-way compression discard the material needed for later rebuilding, and we prove that any policy that only keeps or drops entries carries a residual-deficit floor. We propose CrystalMem (Crystallized Memory), an elastic memory sidecar that demotes entries across four fidelity states under a crystallization-energy schedule, orders demotions by advantage-weighted influence with dependency coupling, and recovers capability through verified recrystallization under explicit compute and byte caps. Across seven environments, seventeen methods, and six backbones, with multi-tenant serving and a physical edge-cloud deployment, CrystalMem achieves the highest restored capability in every setting and closes the loop left open by every baseline. From a 50% byte budget, CrystalMem matches the strongest budgeted baseline at full provision on every environment; at equal budgets, it leads by +4.6 pp on average.

Beining Wu, Jun Huang

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57006 USA

Agent Memory Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Self-Evolving Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jul 31, 2026cs.CL

Zero-Mem: Zero-Token Memory Operations for LLM Agents

LLM agents need memory to act consistently over long interactions, yet many systems use additional LLM calls to operate that memory. Generating intermediate records and mediating their retrieval adds recurring token and time costs, while omitted or merged details can obscure the original evidence. We ask whether structured memory access requires generation at all. Zero-Mem introduces \emph{zero-token memory operations}: no step outside final question answering invokes an LLM or consumes LLM input or output tokens; encoder computation is accounted for separately. Zero-Mem preserves original interaction traces as its source of record. It organizes the traces in two complementary ways. An entity--context graph exposes connections across interactions, while a temporal hierarchy preserves conversational locality and session state. For each query, Zero-Mem weighs the two views, retrieves from both, and follows their structure to recover supporting relations or surrounding context. Deterministic calibration first discards conflicting evidence and then keeps the reader's answer grounded in the retrieved traces. Only the final-QA reader invokes an LLM. Across long-memory and long-context question-answering benchmarks, Zero-Mem achieves competitive performance while eliminating LLM calls and LLM-token consumption from memory operations. With the same final-QA reader and context budget, it reduces memory-operation time cost by 57.6% relative to the fastest compared baseline. Ablations support the contribution of the two views and their query-dependent coordination. Overall, the results show that structured agent memory need not generate an intermediate representation of the past. After peer review, the code and implementation details will be available at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/TheMoon0815/Zero-mem}.

Yilin Xiao, Zhehan Zhu, Yujing Zhang +8

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR · School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics · School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University

Conversational Memory Long-Context QA LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Graph-Based Agent Memory Agent Memory Management

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

Shared Organizational Memory for Enterprise Coding Agents: System Design and Deployment Snapshot

Enterprise coding agents rely on tools and retrieval, yet enterprise knowledge often remains outside public training data and formal documentation: internal DSLs, proprietary platforms, local conventions, recent fixes, and tacit workflows. Existing knowledge interfaces expose stored resources but still depend on agents recognizing and explicitly recording lessons worth reusing, disconnecting capture from the coding workflow and leaving development experience repeatedly rediscovered. We report an ongoing production deployment of a shared organizational memory system that makes capture a platform-level part of coding work: it collects task-adjacent experience with contributor approval, curates it into reusable question-answer memories, gates obvious security and privacy risks, and retrieves memories for future agents. This short paper describes the deployed lifecycle and an operational snapshot. Effects on retrieval and coding tasks remain under evaluation.

Harsh Rao Dhanyamraju, Leonidas Raghav

SAP SE

Software Engineering Agents Coding Agents Agent Memory Management

Jul 31, 2026cs.CR

Memory Provenance Laundering in LLM Agents: A Non-Amplification Firewall for Persistent Memory

Long-term memory lets large language model(LLM) agents reuse prior preferences and work flows, but it also turns untrusted observations into persistent action context. We identify memory provenance laundering: during LLM-based memory consolidation, an external observation may be rewritten as apparent user history or workflow support, preserving an action trigger while erasing the low-trust source that should limit its authority. Existing prompt filters, content sanitizers, and tool guards do not enforce source-authority non-amplification after lossy memory consolidation. We formalize this boundary and instantiate it as Provenance-Preserving Memory Fire wall (PPMF), a lightweight memory middleware that preserves platform-maintained provenance and authorizes tool calls by matching action risk to the authority of action-relevant memories. In our schema-grounded evaluation with fixed risk policies, vulnerable consolidated memories reach up to 1.000 attack success rate(ASR); with intact platform-maintained provenance, confirmation, and risk labels, no evaluated unauthorized high-risk action passes the PPMF gate while confirmed benign actions and targeted low-risk memory use remain executable.

Jinghan Xu, Yiyong Xiao, Wanru Shao +2

Persistent Memory for Language Models Agent Memory Poisoning LLM Agent Safety Tool Access Control for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

MemTxn: A Transaction Boundary for Source-Supported Updates and Complete-State Recovery in Agent Memory

Persistent memory lets long-running large language model agents reuse information across sessions and tasks. Yet errors in writable memory can persist and corrupt future behavior. Existing systems improve storage and retrieval, but they do not provide a transaction boundary for reliable updates and recovery. We therefore propose MemTxn, a governance layer outside the answer model. MemTxn verifies whether an update is supported by its source. It also selects the visible version when facts conflict and restores the application-visible state after a fault. The system uses Ordered PatchTest to validate writes, a Temporal Resolver to select versions, and a durable snapshot journal to recover state. On an item-disjoint audit, MemTxn accepts all 60 supported originals and rejects all 179 hard negatives. Under persistent multi-key faults on LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo states, it restores the complete declared active map without knowing the actual physical write set. On MemoryAgentBench FactConsolidation, MemTxn achieves the highest average F1 across all twelve answer-model configurations. It outperforms Dense by 17.06--24.07 points in five representative settings.

Hanshuai Cui, Zhiqing Tang, Zhi Yao +3

Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Future Networks, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai 519087, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

Agent Memory Management

Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

ChronoMem: Version Control and Semantic Rollback for Large Language Model Agent Memory

LLM agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support multi-session interaction and personalization. However, existing agent memory systems are designed around forward-only evolution, continuously accumulating, consolidating, and overwriting knowledge, with no principled mechanism to inspect, version, or revert prior states. This makes agents brittle under corrections, concept drift, and memory corruption, particularly after they have already been exposed to subsequent information. We present ChronoMem, a semantic version-control layer for agentic memory integrated into the production-ready, open-source Agent Development Kit by Google. ChronoMem commits whole-memory snapshots at each memory write, maintains structured version histories, and supports natural-language rollback requests by mapping undo intents to concrete historical versions through hybrid lexical and semantic retrieval, rank fusion, and reranking. We further introduce a post-exposure evaluation protocol that tests whether an agent can behave counterfactually after rollback by answering queries and summarizing history as if future updates had never occurred. On long-horizon conversational benchmarks augmented with evolving memory states and rollback tasks, ChronoMem substantially improves rollback-consistent question answering and history summarization relative to prompt-only and retrieval-only baselines, while achieving strong performance in semantic version selection. To our knowledge, ChronoMem is the first open-source system and benchmark for systematic semantic global memory rollback in LLM agents.

Yongye Su, Wujiang Xu, Chaoji Zuo +1

Purdue University · USA · Rutgers University

LLM Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Jul 29, 2026cs.CR

MemSecBench: Tracking Agent Memory Poisoning from Persistence to Consequence and Repair

Memory systems allow agents to retain and reuse information from past interactions, but they can also let malicious content persist. A malicious instruction crafted by an attacker may be stored in long-term memory, recalled much later, and quietly shape a real action. Recent benchmarks increasingly examine agent memory security, yet few trace the same malicious semantics across persistence, downstream consequences, and selective repair under diverse memory-backend comparisons. To address this gap, we introduce MemSecBench, a task-grounded benchmark for the lifecycle security of agent memory systems. It contains 310 cases drawn from 48 realistic contexts across code and science, daily life, and office work. Each case follows a controlled Write--Execute--Forget protocol in an isolated runtime under an exact agent configuration, defined by an agent harness, a memory backend, and an LLM backend. Evidence-based adjudication combines a deterministic write check, checkpoint-specific judge-model evaluations, and programmatic gates across seven lifecycle checkpoints. The experimental design spans a 24-configuration matrix of two agent harnesses, four memory backends, and three LLM backends. Across all 24 configurations, malicious memory persists in 84.2% of all cases, and the full Write--Execute chain succeeds in 50.3%. Among successfully poisoned cases, 59.6% complete the full Execute chain, while 56.1% achieve selective repair.Compared with matched Native configurations, the largest absolute differences are 16.1 percentage points for end-to-end attack success and 41.3 percentage points for selective repair. These descriptive contrasts indicate that the evaluated memory system stacks differ in lifecycle security, both in the propagation of malicious memory and in selective repair after successful memory poisoning.

Xuanze Chen, Xukang Xie, Wentao Fu +3

Institute of Cyberspace Security, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China · Binjiang Institute of Artificial Intelligence, ZJUT, Hangzhou 310056, China · College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China

Agent Memory Poisoning Memory Agent Benchmarks Agent Memory Management

Jul 29, 2026cs.CL

Filesystem-Based Memory for LLM Agents: Organization, Evolution, and Sustainability

Deployed LLM agents increasingly keep their long-term memory as a filesystem: a directory tree of markdown files that the agent itself reads, writes, and reorganizes through generic file tools. Yet research has largely passed over this medium: prior systems design bespoke memory representations and study retrieval over them, leaving the default's two working assumptions untested: that an agent can keep a growing store organized as memories accumulate, conflict, and go stale, and that this organization pays. We present the first systematic exploration of filesystem-based memory for LLM agents. We formalize the setting as three roles around one memory filesystem: a management agent integrates and organizes incoming content, a search agent answers queries with cited sources, and an execution agent supplies task trajectories that are distilled into skills, unifying declarative memory and skills in a single store. Across long-conversation benchmarks and embodied tasks, we vary memory shape (agent-organized hierarchy, verbatim dump, chunk retrieval), stream scale, tool harness (sandboxed shell, memory-tool-style functions, varied search tooling), and the strengths of the management and search agents, tracking answer quality, cost, and store health as memory grows. What organization reliably buys is search economy: organized stores roughly halve retrieval cost where material is large. Today's agents, however, fall short of the default's promise: in our growth study, organization erodes for all but the strongest management agent, and no agent we measure converts organization itself into better answers. And the model is not the only lever over a store's shape: changing the tool set alone reshapes the store as strongly as swapping the model. The study turns the filesystem default from an assumption into a design space for agent memory.

Sizhe Zhou, Sheldon Yu, Hui Wei +8

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · University of California, San Diego · University of California, Merced +2

Agent Memory LLM Agent Memory Memory Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Harnesses Agent Memory Management

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

UniMem: Complementary Episodic-to-Parametric Memory for Boundary-Agnostic Task Streams

Memory is essential for LLM agents to accumulate task experience and reuse task-specific execution strategies. However, real-world deployment over boundary-agnostic and evolving task streams exposes a fundamental stability-plasticity dilemma. External retrieval-based memory can rapidly absorb new evidence, but it often fails to internalize recurring execution patterns and incurs inference-time retrieval overhead. Parametric memory enables stable and efficient execution once learned, but typically relies on explicit task boundaries and fixed parameter budgets. Inspired by the human brain, which balances plasticity and stability through complementary episodic storage and gradual consolidation, we propose UniMem, a self-routing framework for autonomous memory management. UniMem uses learnable routing tokens as memory controllers, enabling adaptive coordination between complementary memory pathways: novel or sparse tasks are retained in an episodic buffer for retrieval-augmented execution, while recurring and reliable patterns are consolidated into expandable parametric memory. By decoupling task identification from task execution with routing tokens and parametric memory blocks, UniMem expands memory on demand without task labels during deployment or uncontrolled parameter growth. Experiments on long-horizon streaming task sequences show that UniMem consistently outperforms baselines while maintaining execution fidelity, achieving an average gain of 4.0 EM points across three backbone models.

Siyu Xia, Chenheng Zhang, Yanting Wu +8

Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · State Key Lab of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University +3

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Online Continual Learning Memory Consolidation Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jul 28, 2026cs.DB

MemLens: A Value-Aware Memory Management System with Interactive Analytics for LLM-based Agents

Recently, memory management has become a key infrastructure for LLM-based agents, as it directly affects long-horizon reasoning, personalized responses, and knowledge reuse. However, existing LLM memory systems typically adopt a coarse-grained (utility-agnostic) manner that treats heterogeneous user-LLM interaction records uniformly, leading to redundant and low-impact records persisting in the memory repository. To address this challenge, we present MemLens, a value-aware memory management system that takes memory records as first-class data objects. MemLens provides an end-to-end interactive analytics dashboard that exposes the complete memory lifecycle, including Shapley-style memory evaluation, value-aware storage, and memory-assisted response. Through a study-copilot application, the system enables users to inspect memory values, visualize hierarchical memory structures, and compare various memory management strategies in terms of response quality, retrieval latency, and token consumption. Therefore, our MemLens can serve as an efficient, interpretable, and personalized long-term memory management system for LLM-based agents.

Shuyue Wei, Chang Liu, Zimu Zhou +2

C-FAIR & School of Software, Shandong University · SKLCCSE Lab, Beihang University · Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong

LLM Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

Addressable Recall Compaction for Long Context-Window Control in AI Agents

Long-horizon LLM agents accumulate reasoning traces, actions, and tool observations that can eventually exceed a model's fixed context window. Existing compaction methods address this limitation by discarding, summarizing, or retrieving earlier information, but they may remove task-critical details or fail to recover them reliably. We propose ARC (Addressable Recall Compaction), a context-management framework that separates archival storage from active-context presentation. ARC stores tool observations in an append-only, ID-addressable log and replaces older observations with compact citations when compaction is required. The agent can subsequently use these identifiers to request stored content without re-executing the corresponding tools or depending solely on similarity-based retrieval. We evaluate ARC using Qwen3-8B with a 16k context window and Qwen3-32B with a 32k context window. On the Needle-in-a-Haystack evaluation, ARC achieves an average exact-answer accuracy of 99.40%, compared with 88.12% for the best-performing baseline in our evaluation. ARC also reduces estimated serving time and HBM traffic under our hardware-cost model. On the LongBench-v2 Hard subset, ARC obtains an average accuracy of 29.97%, compared with 28.25% for the best-performing baseline. These results indicate that explicit, address-based recall can improve information retention and serving efficiency relative to the evaluated context-management baselines under the tested settings.

Thang Dang, Yuma Ichikawa, Sakina Fatima +1

Fujitsu Research of America · Fujitsu Limited Japan · RIKEN Center for AIP

Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Context Management Agent Memory Management Context Compression

Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

From Cognitive Architectures to Language Agents: A Mechanism-Level Review of Lineage, Convergence, and Migration Gaps

Memory, planning, reflection, and tool use are often compared as feature labels, obscuring the control semantics that determine how an agent actually runs. This review connects ten historical cognitive architectures, eight language-agent runtime families, and forty-two mechanism-focused modern systems. We reconstruct each mechanism through state, control, transition, persistence, failure, learning, and resource governance, then code evidence relation (E1-E4) separately from migration depth (D0-D4). The resulting landscape is uneven. Modern agents have operationalized substantial parts of adaptive memory, failure recovery, dynamic team selection, workflow search, skill induction, resource scheduling, and uncertainty-conditioned action, although often through independent convergence rather than documented inheritance. The strongest remaining opportunities lie in couplings among mechanisms. Closest-baseline screening closes one proposed gap: GraSP already combines calibrated multi-skill selection, typed compilation, verification, bounded repair, and replanning or ReAct fallback. Five residual bundles remain: activation with latency and action utility; typed impasse with isolated substates and resolution compilation; bounded content competition with broadcast and admission learning; persistent intention with reconsideration and live method authority; and uncertainty with resource allocation, interruption, and stopping. We contribute a distinctive-mechanism catalog, an auditable evidence-depth framework, and a falsifiable agenda for testing these bundles as composable runtime invariants.

Haodi Fan, Zucong Lan

Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents Computational Cognitive Modeling LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Planning Agent Memory Management

Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

MemTX: Transactional Belief Commit for Stateful Agent Memory

LLM agents increasingly coordinate through persistent shared memory: one agent's write becomes another agent's premise, and eventually a tool call with real side effects. Current agent memory systems treat every accepted write as immediately actionable truth, so a polluted tool result, a stale update, or a teammate's half-finished note can silently drive an irreversible action. We argue that a memory write is not a belief commit. We present MemTX, a transactional belief-commit protocol. Each record carries evidence, permissions, provenance, and validity. Writes are staged inside snapshot-isolated transactions and admitted by a validate-and-commit pipeline, irreversible tool calls are gated on in-flight belief state, and retracting a belief triggers typed cascading repair of its derived records and tool side effects. Two invariants, action-safety gating and cascade-repair completeness, are machine-checked by property-based testing and bounded exhaustive enumeration of 5.5 million protocol states, with zero violations. Across five backbones from three model families, MemTX leads all eight baselines with paired-McNemar significance on four backbones and statistically ties the best baseline on the fifth and strongest, while remaining the only method with zero downstream harm on every backbone. Backbone capability does not substitute for commit discipline.

Xiaoyang Li, Yiqi Wang, Haohui Lu +5

University of Southern Queensland · 2Griffith University · 3The University of Sydney +2

Belief Revision LLM Agent Safety Tool Access Control for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management

Jul 26, 2026cs.AI

Compute Globally, Materialize Locally: The Memory Contract of Sparse Event-KV

Long-horizon agents increasingly reuse their KV cache as memory: a serving system keeps a subset of cached entries and drops the rest. Eviction and episodic-memory schemes therefore rest on a premise rarely tested directly, that a retained event is still informative once the observations that produced it are gone. We test it by omitting one earlier observation from what is served, across otherwise identical agent histories. Among items sensitive to that observation, the answer overwhelmingly follows the omitted value, though no served span says which value is correct. We call this semantic materialization: a downstream event's cached rows act as an independently servable view of computation whose inputs are gone. It can also be written on purpose. A deliberately phrased, answer-free event raises donor-aligned recovery from 6% to 51% on Qwen3-8B without ever naming the value, whereas passively harvesting natural mentions from long-term dialog yields no detected advantage. What such a row carries is specific and bounded. Compact state survives, larger payloads decay toward chance, and whether a construction writes at all turns on phrasing rather than on meaning alone, so two phrasings the model comprehends equally well can diverge sharply. The result is a memory contract for sparse event-KV serving: what to write, where it lands, and what survives once the source is gone. For anyone who evicts the corollary is that dropping a source event and observing no accuracy loss does not show the source was unnecessary.

Zefeng Cai, Zerui Cai

Independent Researchers

KV Caching KV-Cache Eviction Persistent Memory for Language Models Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents