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.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 308

Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

Temporal Order Matters for Agentic Memory: Segment Trees for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon conversational agents need to interact with users through evolving events, tasks, and goals. Such histories are naturally temporal, yet many existing memory systems organize information primarily by topical similarity and may ignore the order in which events occur. We introduce Segment Tree Memory, or SegTreeMem, a memory architecture that represents conversation history as a temporally ordered Segment Tree over utterances. SegTreeMem incrementally inserts new utterances through an online rightmost-frontier update rule, preserving chronological order while forming hierarchical memory segments. For retrieval, SegTreeMem propagates relevance scores through the tree to combine local semantic matching with hierarchical temporal context. Across three long-horizon memory benchmarks and two LLM backbones, SegTreeMem improves answer quality over flat retrieval, graph-structured memory, and tree-structured memory baselines. Additional temporal-order permutation analysis shows that the performance gain depends on preserving temporal order during memory construction, supporting the claim that temporal order is a key structure for agentic memory.
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

Exploring Cross-Scenario Generality of Agentic Memory Systems: Diagnostics and a Strong Baseline

LLM agents accumulate histories that outgrow their context windows, motivating a growing literature on memory systems. Yet most existing designs are tuned to a single scenario (multi-session chat or a single trajectory format), and there is little evidence that they generalize across the heterogeneous trajectories agents encounter in deployment. We revisit eight memory systems plus an agentic harness for search problems, on five scenarios: single-turn QA, multi-session chat, agentic-trajectory QA, memory stress tests, and long-horizon agentic tasks. The harness, which self-manages flat text-file storage via tool calls, achieves the best cross-task ranking, suggesting that memory performance hinges on giving the agent active control over storage and retrieval rather than on a passive store behind a fixed pipeline. We instantiate this insight in AutoMEM, an agentic memory harness with a self-managed tool interface that achieves the best cross-scenario generality among the systems we evaluate.
Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

SaliMory: Orchestrating Cognitive Memory for Conversational Agents

Conversational agents that serve as lifelong companions must maintain persistent memory across all interactions. However, simply expanding context windows with raw retrieval degrades reasoning quality, while training memory agents via standard reinforcement learning creates a severe credit assignment bottleneck in a multi-stage pipeline. To solve this, we introduce SALIMORY, a framework that trains a single language model to manage a cognitively-structured memory-spanning user facts, preferences, and working memory. By introducing a hierarchical stage-wise process reward and reward-decomposed contrastive refinement, SALIMORY provides isolated supervision for distinct memory operations (selective filtering, consolidation, and cue-driven recall) end-to-end. SALIMORY cuts memory-attributed failures by one-third, outperforms the state-of-the-art by over 10% in end-to-end accuracy, and more than doubles the Good Personalization rate.
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

DMF: A Deterministic Memory Framework for Conversational AI Agents

Conversational AI agents require memory systems that are both scalable and semantically coherent across long interaction horizons. Existing approaches rely predominantly on large language model (LLM)-based summarisation at write time, which introduces non-determinism, escalating token costs, and opacity in pruning decisions. We present the Deterministic Memory Framework (DMF), a CPU-first approach that replaces generative memory compression with a fully deterministic pipeline grounded in classical NLP analysis, vector geometry, and mathematical scoring. DMF assigns each conversational interaction a Survival Score ΩΩ computed from deterministic content signals, conversational cues, and structured provenance, combined through a logistic projection. An interaction-count decay law, denoted as Ωeff(Δn)Ω_{\mathrm{eff}}(Δn), governs how relevance evolves as new turns arrive, where ΔnΔn is the number of newer interactions rather than wall-clock time, preserving full determinism. We present the mathematical formulation of DMF, its structured recall pipeline, the pruning decision procedure, and the evaluation protocol. Experiments are conducted on a purpose-built benchmark using the LoCoMo and LongMemEval datasets. We compare DMF against Mem0, a popular memory layer for AI agents. DMF achieves comparable accuracy while using zero tokens to prepare the memory context and 5x to 242x fewer tokens over the entire conversation. These results show that it is possible to eliminate LLM calls from the memory-management loop, reducing token costs to nearly zero and enabling deterministic memory systems for conversational AI agents.
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

eMEM: A Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Memory System For Embodied Agents

We present eMEM (Embodied Memory), a hybrid graph-based memory system for embodied agents operating in physical environments. Current agent memory architectures, such as Generative Agents, MemGPT, and A-MEM, treat memory as text streams or knowledge graphs, but embodied agents require memory that is simultaneously searchable by meaning, space, and time. eMEM fills this gap with a multi-index architecture (SQLITE for structured storage, hnswlib for approximate nearest neighbour semantic search, and an R-tree for spatial queries) unified behind a single graph model. A tiered consolidation pipeline transforms raw perceptual observations into compressed summaries, mirroring hippocampal-neocortical consolidation in biological systems. Ten agent-facing recall tools expose memory retrieval primitives, including concept-to-location resolution and cross layer recall, as first-class operations for LLM tool calling. The system is fully embedded and runs in-process alongside the agent. In addition we introduce eMEM-Bench v1, a benchmark we construct over ProcTHOR-10K scenes for embodied memory evaluation. The benchmark is organised explicitly around eight cognitive-psychology paradigms (DRM lures, pattern separation, pattern completion, source monitoring, context-dependent retrieval, long-horizon interference, serial position, and a foil augmented retention curve), each chosen so that the result is interpretable against the broader memory-systems literature in humans and prior agent-memory systems; a level of diagnostic that surface-task benchmarks like LoCoMo or OpenEQA cannot provide. eMEM scores 80.8 weighted mean over 988 probes, with a flat retention curve at ceiling from 1 h to 1 yr of simulated delay on room-unique items. We show that a pure RAG baseline (the flat_rag ablation) loses 30 pt on context dependent retrieval and 29 pt on DRM lure rejection, isolating the contribution of multi-layer storage and consolidation respectively. We release both the system and the benchmark code.
Jun 1, 2026cs.AI

AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM

The KV-cache is the right memory for datacenters but the wrong memory for robots. Datacenter inference batches many short requests and resets them, amortizing an attention cache across a crowd. Embodied agents instead run one long, non-resetting episode on bandwidth-limited edge hardware, where high-bandwidth memory and flash are scarce, flash has finite write endurance, and memory writes rather than compute can become the binding constraint. AURA-Mem (Action-Utility Recurrent Adaptive Memory) targets this regime. It wraps a frozen vision-language-action backbone with a constant-size recurrent memory and a learned gate that writes only when the current observation would change the next action: memory that knows when to stay silent. Unlike reconstruction-based memory, the gate is trained directly against a closed-loop action-error signal. Its inference state is fixed at 4,224 bytes regardless of horizon, while a KV-cache grows to 6,061 times larger at 100,000 steps. On a controlled synthetic benchmark, AURA-Mem matches the best O(1) baseline in accuracy while using 5.19-6.13 times fewer writes, and up to 9.19 times fewer writes on easier configurations. Budget-matched random and periodic schedules do not recover this gain, isolating the benefit to the action-surprise signal. On a trained closed-loop OpenVLA-OFT 7B panel on LIBERO-Long (n=60 episodes per arm), the gate does not hurt success: AURA-Mem matches the ungated base policy (0.233) and slightly exceeds an always-write KV arm (0.217), while using 7.0 times fewer writes and constant memory. We also instantiate an approximate-information-state value-loss bound as a methodology demonstration; at this scale, the bound is vacuous rather than a guarantee.
May 31, 2026cs.CR

memorywire: A Vendor-Neutral Wire Format for Agent Memory Operations

Agent-memory frameworks -- mem0, Letta/MemGPT, Cognee, Zep/Graphiti, MemoryOS, MemTensor -- each ship their own SDK, storage layout, and operational vocabulary. There is no shared wire format: every integration is bespoke, every migration rebuilds memory from scratch, and no framework ships a governance surface that lets a human review writes before they enter long-term storage. We present memorywire, a JSON-Schema 2020-12 wire format for five memory operations (remember, recall, forget, merge, expire) over four memory types (semantic, episodic, procedural, emotional), with a MemoryStore interface, a fan-out router, and an optional HITL governance channel. We describe an open-source reference implementation with five backend adapters (sqlite-vec, mem0, Letta, Cognee, pgvector); a microbenchmark on a 100-fact / 50-query labelled corpus (42 with non-empty gold ids + 8 no-match probes) achieving recall@5 = 1.000 on the 42 gold-id queries with ingest p50 = 37.8 ms and recall p50 = 40.6 ms; an adversarial-fusion experiment showing Reciprocal Rank Fusion holds recall@5 = 1.000 across a 1-of-N rank-0 injection sweep (K in {0, 5, ..., 50}) where max fusion collapses to 0.500 with 80% leak at K >= 5; and a 16-scenario cross-adapter conformance suite passing 68 of 80 cells with zero failures. The contribution is not a new algorithm; it is a packaging of established components (RRF, FSMs, STM/LTM consolidation, diff-and-approve workflows) into a venue-neutral protocol with an empirically validated reference, positioned to compose with the Model Context Protocol rather than compete with it.
May 30, 2026cs.CL

MemPro: Agentic Memory Systems as Evolvable Programs

Long-horizon autonomous agents require memory systems to retain historical information, track evolving states, and reuse relevant knowledge beyond finite context windows. Existing agentic memory systems typically follow a memory construction-retrieval (MCR) pipeline, but often adapt mainly the memory bank while keeping the surrounding pipeline fixed after deployment. This fixed-pipeline design struggles to handle heterogeneous task-specific failure modes and can become misaligned with memory banks that evolve in scale and structure over time. To address these limitations, we propose MemPro, a system-level evolution framework that treats the entire MCR pipeline as an evolvable program rather than adapting only the memory bank or prompt text. MemPro maintains a version tree of runnable memory-system implementations, where an Evolving Agent iteratively selects promising versions, diagnoses recurring failures, and creates improved child versions through failure-mode-guided edit-debug refinement. Experiments on LongMemEval, LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and NarrativeQA show that MemPro consistently outperforms strong static and prompt-level evolving baselines within a few iterations, continues to improve with evolution, and achieves a favorable performance-cost trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/wanghai673/MemPro.
May 29, 2026cs.CV

EGOSTREAM: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Streaming Episodic Memory in Egocentric Vision

Continuous episodic memory is a core capability for autonomous agents operating in dynamic, real-world environments, yet current streaming video benchmarks provide limited tools for diagnosing what models remember and for how long. We introduce Egostream, a diagnostic benchmark for streaming episodic memory evaluation in egocentric vision. \egostream organizes 2,250 curated questions along seven cognitive dimensions: detail, spatial, temporal, event, social, causal, and prospective memory. We introduce the Answer Validity Window (AVW), which specifies the temporal span an answer remains valid as the observed scene evolves. This allows us to expand the questions into 8,528 recall-conditioned evaluations, enabling controlled testing from instant to ultra-long-term recall while separating genuine model forgetting from natural world-state changes. We rigorously establish baseline performance through a unified streaming MLLM framework that compares several state-of-the-art memory-management mechanisms, covering sliding windows, attention sinks, KV-cache pruning, merging, and offloading. Experiments within a unified Qwen3-VL backbone reveal that comparable aggregate accuracies mask starkly different memory profiles. For instance, token pruning preserves fine-grained details and temporal structure significantly better than token merging, while quantized offloading rescues ultra-long-term recall. Ultimately, all mechanisms operate well below real-time (>1s per frame), and top performing methods ceil at about 45% accuracy, exposing critical gaps in current architectures. Egostream provides the diagnostic testbed needed to close these gaps. Project website, news and updates at: https://saroo25.github.io/Egostream/
May 29, 2026cs.LG

CoMem: Context Management with A Decoupled Long-Context Model

Context management enables agentic models to solve long-horizon tasks through iterative summarization of previous interaction histories. However, this process typically incurs substantial decoding overhead for the extra summarization tokens, which significantly affect the end-to-end response latency at deployment. In this paper, we introduce CoMem, a novel framework that decouples memory management from the primary agent workflow, enabling these processes to execute in parallel. We propose a kk-step-off asynchronous pipeline that overlaps the memory model's summarization with the agent's inference, effectively masking the latency of context processing. To ensure robustness under this asynchronous setting, we introduce a reward-driven training strategy that aligns the memory model to capture sufficient statistics for the agent's decision-making. Theoretical analysis confirms that CoMem offers a superior efficiency-effectiveness trade-off compared to coupled architectures. Our extensive experimental results on SWE-Bench-Verified show that CoMem provides 1.4x latency improvements upon vanilla long-context solutions while preserving most of the performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these latency gains scale favorably with increased system throughput, offering a modular path forward for the independent optimization of agent reasoning and memory compression.
May 29, 2026cs.CL

Eywa: Provenance-Grounded Long-Term Memory for AI Agents

AI agents that persist across sessions need memory they can retrieve, audit, update, and erase. Existing memory systems often collapse source evidence, extracted facts, retrieved context, and answer policy into one opaque prompt path, making failures difficult to diagnose: a wrong answer may come from missing evidence, unsupported extraction, stale state, retrieval loss, or answer-model behavior. We present Eywa, a provenance-grounded memory architecture built around evidence before belief. Eywa stores immutable source evidence before deriving canonical facts, validates extracted memories against typed signals and source support, and retrieves bounded memory context through a deterministic multi-route read path with zero LLM calls inside retrieval. Retrieved context is returned separately from answer instructions, allowing the same memory substrate to be evaluated across frontier, budget, and local answer models. Under a frozen, artifact-recorded retrieval configuration, Eywa reaches 90.19% judge accuracy on the LoCoMo C1-C4 split with Claude Sonnet 4.6 write and QA roles. On LongMemEval-S, it reaches 88.2% retrieval-sufficiency accuracy. On BEAM, a 700-question technical-memory stress benchmark, it reaches 81.45% mean nugget score and 85.29% pass@score >= 0.5. Full per-question artifacts, including questions, gold answers, model answers, retrieved context, and labels, are published at https://eywa.to/research.
May 29, 2026cs.CL

SAGE: A Novelty Gate for Efficient Memory Evolution in Agentic LLMs

Agentic LLMs must continuously decide whether newly extracted facts should be added, merged with existing memories, or ignored, yet prior work has focused more on retrieval and storage than on principled write-side control. We frame memory evolution as a novelty-detection problem and propose SAGE, a Spherical Adaptive Gate for memory Evolution that scores candidate facts with a von Mises-Fisher-based density estimator over memory embeddings and routes them with an adaptive threshold that tracks memory-store geometry. SAGE resolves clearly novel facts as ADD, clearly redundant facts as NOOP, and sends only uncertain cases to an LLM merge step, reducing expensive write-time reasoning. On LoCoMo, SAGE achieves the best average token-F1 against Mem0 on all seven open-weight backbone comparisons, while on GPT-4o-mini it reduces add-phase API cost by 3.4×\times and add-phase latency by 2.5×\times with only a small average judge-score gap. As a drop-in binary gate for A-Mem, SAGE skips roughly 16-18% of LLM calls across five models with minimal quality change on open-weight backbones. These results suggest that novelty-aware write control is a practical lever for improving both memory quality and system efficiency in long-term agentic memory. The source code for our approach is accessible at https://github.com/swang1024/SAGE.
May 29, 2026cs.CL

ElasticMem: Latent Memory as a Learnable Resource for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for LLM agents to reason coherently across extended interactions, personalize responses, and reuse past experience. However, existing memory-augmented methods typically treat memory as a fixed resource: text-space approaches concatenate retrieved memories into the context window, causing substantial token overhead and sensitivity to noisy evidence, while latent-space approaches reduce textual cost but still rely on rigid retrieval or fixed-capacity memory interfaces. This creates a mismatch between query-dependent memory utility and fixed memory allocation. We propose ElasticMem, a memory-augmented LLM framework that learns to use memory as an elastic latent resource. ElasticMem builds an offline latent memory bank with retrieval keys and content caches, retrieves memories adaptively from the reasoner's hidden state, assigns each retrieved memory a variable latent budget through a learned policy, and injects selected latent states as soft memory tokens for generation. The full memory-use process is optimized with downstream task rewards through group-relative policy optimization. We evaluate ElasticMem on MemorySuite, covering memory-intensive QA and embodied agent control. Across Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbones, ElasticMem improves weighted average QA accuracy by 26.2% and 24.6%, and improves ALFWorld success rate by 66.3% and 27.2%, respectively, over the strongest baselines, while achieving the lowest ALFWorld token cost. Ablations and qualitative analyses further show that adaptive retrieval and elastic budget allocation help ElasticMem prioritize useful evidence and transferable plans beyond rigid cosine similarity. Our code for ElasticMem will be released at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/ElasticMem.
May 28, 2026cs.AI

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.
May 28, 2026cs.CL

STAMP: Training Explicit Memory for Mobile GUI Agents in Controllable and Scalable Virtual Environments

Mobile GUI agents excel at immediate reactive control but frequently fail in realistic, long-horizon tasks that require memory. This failure stems from a fundamental conflict between limited context windows and token-heavy screenshots. To save the limited context, agents must progressively discard older visual history, permanently losing crucial transient information. Furthermore, existing action-centric datasets fail to teach agents what or when to explicitly memorize, and augmenting static real-world data is prohibitively expensive and lacks interactive verification. To resolve this, we present STAMP, a framework that trains explicit memory in mobile agents through controllable virtual environments, where deterministic memory variables are programmatically injected into synthesized tasks to control what must be memorized, when it should be encoded, and when it must later be retrieved, thereby producing verifiable supervised data at scale and enabling online reinforcement learning through environment-driven reward feedback. Evaluated on our newly introduced Memory-World benchmark, the resulting Stamp-GUI agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among GUI-specialized models and sets a new high watermark on our Memory-World benchmark, demonstrating exceptional memory accuracy and task resilience while maintaining strong general mobile navigation capabilities.
May 27, 2026cs.CL

Rethinking Memory as Continuously Evolving Connectivity

Existing memory-augmented LLM agents often treat memory as a static repository with pre-defined representations and fixed retrieval pipelines, which is brittle in dynamic agentic environments where feedback, task variation, and heterogeneous signals continuously reshape what should be remembered and how it should be connected. To address this, we propose FluxMem, a connectivity-evolving memory framework that models memory as a heterogeneous graph and progressively refines its topology through three stages: initial connection formation, feedback-driven refinement, and long-term consolidation. During execution, FluxMem repairs missing links, prunes interference, aligns abstraction granularity, and distills recurrent successful trajectories into reusable procedural circuits, guided by one metric for memory generalizability and evolutionary maturity. Across three fundamentally distinct benchmarks including LoCoMo, Mind2Web, and GAIA, FluxMem achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptation and generalization in complex agentic environments. The code will be open-sourced in https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem.
May 27, 2026cs.AI

MemCog: From Memory-as-Tool to Memory-as-Cognition in Conversational Agents

Existing agent memory systems universally follow what we term a Memory-as-Tool paradigm where a single query triggers one-shot retrieval of flat passage lists, suffering from passive invocation, reasoning-retrieval decoupling, and structural mismatch between retrieved fragments and the agent's navigational needs. We propose MemCog, a Memory-as-Cognition system that makes memory access an integral part of the reasoning process. MemCog organizes user knowledge as Navigable Memory Store with associative link graphs, exposes Cross-Dimensional Navigation Interface for multi-step reasoning-driven traversal, and employs Proactive Reasoning Protocol that drives agents to spontaneously initiate memory exploration from conversational context. We additionally construct ProactiveMemBench, the first benchmark for evaluating proactive memory triggering. Experiments show that MemCog achieves state-of-the-art on passive QA benchmarks (92.98 on LoCoMo, 95.8 on LongMemEval) while substantially outperforming baselines on ProactiveMemBench, demonstrating the advantage of Memory-as-Cognition.
May 27, 2026cs.CL

MemGuard: Preventing Memory Contamination in Long-Term Memory-Augmented Large Language Models

Memory-augmented large language models extend reasoning beyond a fixed context window by maintaining long-term memory across interactions. However, existing memory systems often collapse stable user facts, episodic events, and behavioral rules into a shared space, allowing functionally distinct memories to be retrieved and used as interchangeable evidence. We identify this failure mode as heterogeneous memory contamination, where context-specific events become overgeneralized claims, or semantically relevant but functionally incompatible memories mislead generation. To this end, we introduce MemGuard, a type-aware memory framework that preserves functional memory boundaries during memory construction and retrieval. It assigns each memory an explicit functional role at write time, maintains relations across type-isolated memories, and selectively composes evidence only from necessary memory types, reducing contamination from irrelevant or functionally incompatible evidence. Across hallucination and long-horizon conversation benchmarks, MemGuard improves memory reliability by up to 28.27% while retrieving up to 5.8x fewer memory tokens than prior methods. These results suggest that reliable long-term reasoning depends on principled organization and selective use of heterogeneous memory.
May 26, 2026cs.AI

MemFail: Stress-Testing Failure Modes of LLM Memory Systems

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to remain consistent across long-horizon interactions, but little empirical work has been done to understand the specific failure modes and design choices that these systems present. Existing benchmarks report aggregate question-answering accuracy and treat memory systems as black boxes, making it impossible to attribute an incorrect answer to a particular failure mode of the system. We introduce MemFail, a diagnostic benchmark that isolates the failure modes of modern LLM memory systems. We begin by formalizing memory systems as the composition of three canonical operations -- summarization, storage, and retrieval -- and identify the potential failure modes induced by each. Based on these hypothesized failure modes, we construct five datasets spanning four tasks, each adversarially designed to test a specific operation of a memory system. Using these datasets, we evaluate four state-of-the-art memory systems on MemFail and demonstrate how MemFail can be used to empirically understand the tradeoffs induced by differences in memory system architectures.
May 25, 2026cs.AI

Your Agents Are Aging Too: Agent Lifespan Engineering for Deployed Systems

Long-lived AI agents are increasingly deployed as persistent operational systems, yet they are still evaluated like freshly initialized models. Day-one benchmarks miss a basic systems question: how long does an agent remain reliable after deployment? Even when model weights are frozen, an agent's effective state keeps changing as it compresses interaction history, retrieves from a growing memory store, revises facts after updates, and undergoes routine maintenance. Reliability therefore becomes a lifespan property of the full agent harness, not only a snapshot property of the base model. We introduce AgingBench, a longitudinal reliability benchmark for agent lifespan engineering: measuring not only whether deployed agents degrade, but what form the degradation takes and where repair should target. AgingBench organizes agent aging into four mechanisms: compression aging, interference aging, revision aging, and maintenance aging. To diagnose these failures, AgingBench uses temporal dependency graphs and paired counterfactual probes that produce diagnostic profiles for the write, retrieval, and utilization stages of the memory pipeline. Across 7 scenarios, 14 models, multiple memory policies, and both runner-controlled and autonomous agents, over ~400 runs spanning 8 - 200 sessions show that agent aging is not one-dimensional: behavioral tests can remain clean while factual precision decays; derived-state tracking can collapse sharply within a single model; and the same wrong answer can require different repairs depending on what the diagnostic profile points to. These results suggest that reliable agent deployment requires lifespan evaluation, mechanism-level diagnosis, and stage-targeted repair, not only stronger day-one models.
May 25, 2026cs.AI

Is Agent Memory a Database? Rethinking Data Foundations for Long-Term AI Agent Memory

Long-running AI agents need persistent memory. Memory supports learning across sessions, reduces repeated context injection, and enables auditing of past decisions. Current agent memory systems and database paradigms treat memory as storage. They localize correctness at records, embeddings, or edges. Each supplies only some of the capabilities that long-term memory requires. The result is four recurring failure modes: unregulated growth, missing semantic revision, capacity-driven forgetting, and read-only retrieval. In our vision, long-term agent memory is a new data-management workload. Its correctness is a property of the state trajectory, not of individual records. We formalize this as Governed Evolving Memory (GEM). GEM replaces record-level database operations with four state-level operators: ingestion, revision, forgetting, and retrieval. Six correctness conditions govern how the state evolves. Three structural observations establish that no record-level system can satisfy these conditions, regardless of the storage model. We realize the abstraction in MemState, a prototype on a property-graph backend. MemState validates feasibility and exposes the gap to a native engine. We outline three research directions that define memory-centric data management as a workload.
May 25, 2026cs.CL

Mitigating Provenance-Role Collapse in Long-Term Agents via Typed Memory Representation

Long-term memory is essential for persistent LLM agents, yet prevailing architectures store historical interactions as unstructured, flat text. This unconstrained storage induces provenance-role collapse, a critical failure mode where agents suffer from source-monitoring errors. To resolve this cognitive vulnerability at the architectural level, we propose MemIR, a typed Memory Intermediate Representation that operationalizes source monitoring as a structural constraint. MemIR writes long-term memory into grounded atoms that separate raw evidence, retrieval cues, and truth-bearing claims, with factual authorization restricted to supported claim atoms. It then applies multi-route atomic projection and provenance-scoped utilization to transform heterogeneous retrieval hits into claim-centered candidate bundles and a normalized fact interface for answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and BEAM-100K demonstrate that MemIR consistently outperforms existing memory baselines, especially on tasks requiring source tracking, temporal grounding, and aggregation of fragmented evidence.
May 25, 2026cs.AI

Personalize-then-Store: Benchmarking and Learning Personalized Memory for Long-horizon Agents

Existing large language model (LLM) based memory systems apply universal, static policies that overlook a fundamental reality: the contexts that are worth storing in memory are different across users. This misalignment wastes limited memory budget on transient interactions while failing to preserve critical context for long horizon tasks. To address this gap, we investigate an underexplored question: can LLM based memory systems learn personalized memory policies? We introduce PerMemBench, the first benchmark for evaluating personalized memory systems, featuring multi year, multi domain interaction histories across diverse user personas. We further present the first empirical study of memory personalization, proposing session level storage gating, a lightweight framework that selectively bypasses memory operations for transient sessions. Our study confirms that personalization yields substantial retention gains under perfect gating, yet reveals that accurate gating remains an open and critical challenge.
May 24, 2026cs.IR

AgentIR: A Workload-Adaptive Cascade Retrieval Substrate for Long-Term Conversational Memory

Long-term conversational memory is a retrieval workload classical IR was not built for: the index grows during the query stream, query types shift intra-session, and the latency budget per retrieval is sub-10 ms. Lucene-class engines treat the index as static and the query as stateless, leaving the workload's structure unexploited. AgentIR treats fusion as a per-query decision along two axes: which fusion to apply (BM25, Dense, RRF, or agent-aware RRF), and whether the ~52 ms dense channel is worth running at all. The second axis is a confidence-triggered cascade router that decides from the BM25 top-k margin alone and re-tunes across workloads without retraining. On LongMemEval (n=500), where the dense channel does add information, the cascade skips 63% of queries at parity LLM-judged accuracy (2.67x faster under two judges, paired bootstrap p>=0.88); per-qtype thresholds extend this to 5.76x under 5-fold cross-validation. On LoCoMo (n=1,982), where BM25 alone is already the strongest single system, the same trigger auto-tunes to a 100% skip rate (132x faster, +0.089 Hit@5). Capacity on a shared 8-core VM rises from ~154 to ~1,400 concurrent agents (9x). Underneath the cascade, a time-partitioned index does O(log 1/epsilon) work independent of corpus size: 1234x corpus growth costs only 3.6x latency, ending in 1769x over sequential at sub-100 us p50 on 5M records. At parity quality with Lucene on 9 BEIR datasets up to 8.8M docs, the substrate runs 10x geo-mean over Pyserini 8T and 11x over PISA-1T BlockMax-WAND; an A100 reaches 1.8-39x over Pyserini 8T; chunked index build sustains 56.8K docs/sec on MS MARCO. Three subtle BM25/GPU correctness pitfalls that silently regress nDCG@10 by 6-8x are documented and fixed; post-fix CPU and GPU agree within 0.0002 nDCG@10 on all eight datasets that fit a single A100.
May 24, 2026cs.CR

Memory-Induced Tool-Drift in LLM Agents

Modern LLM agents combine long-term memory for personalization with tool-calling interfaces for taking actions in the world -- a combination underpinning contemporary production systems. We study a previously unexamined failure of this combination: when personality-driven biases stored in memory (cost-consciousness, impatience, risk tolerance, etc.) silently affect tool calls in contexts where they are not applicable. We call this memory-induced tool-drift and operationalize it through MEMDRIFT, a benchmark of 105 scenarios spanning five bias dimensions and seven professional domains, generated through an automated adversarial pipeline. Across seven frontier models -- including those with extended reasoning -- biased memories raise deflection scores (a judge-scored measure of parameter deviation from unbiased baselines) by up to +3.6+3.6 points on a 1--5 scale. Tool-drift persists when memory management is handled by three production memory architectures. The phenomenon affects real-world tools: scanning 6{,}062 tools across 288 verified MCP servers, we flag 608 with susceptible parameters and confirm tool-drift on a validated subset. Mechanistically, biased memories act as implicit steering vectors, pushing activations along the same latent directions as explicit behavioral instructions. They also redistribute attention from task-relevant context toward memory entries with surface-level keyword overlap to the target parameter. Standard defenses -- prompt-based relevance instructions and memory filters -- reduce drift but do not eliminate it. As agents take increasingly consequential actions on a user's behalf, memory-induced tool-drift represents a systematic vulnerability that current safeguards do not address, motivating dedicated defenses at the intersection of memory management and tool-call generation.
May 23, 2026cs.AI

SAM: State-Adaptive Memory for Long-Horizon Reasoning Agent

Long-horizon agentic reasoning requires large language models to act over long interaction histories containing thoughts, tool calls, observations, and partial conclusions. The challenge is not merely that these histories grow long, but that information needed for the current decision may be scattered across distant steps and only become relevant later. Existing approaches address this difficulty by truncating the interaction history, compressing it into shorter surrogates, or retrieving selected parts of it for reuse, but they do not explicitly model how access to past interaction should adapt to the agent's evolving state. We instead cast long-horizon reasoning as a problem of state-adaptive memory. To this end, we propose State-Adaptive Memory~(SAM), a standalone framework that consolidates ongoing interaction into compact memory cues while preserving raw trajectory pages for intent-driven recall. These cues are not treated as replacements for history; rather, they serve as lightweight handles that allow the agent to reconstruct temporally distant information according to its current needs, without retraining the underlying backbone. We further optimize the memory module through expert-guided supervision and reinforcement learning, aligning it with trajectory-level utility. Across BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, WideSearch, and HLE, SAM consistently outperforms strong baselines over diverse agent backbones. Our results suggest that explicit memory modeling provides a simple and effective foundation for long-horizon agentic reasoning.
May 21, 2026cs.AI

The Log is the Agent: Event-Sourced Reactive Graphs for Auditable, Forkable Agentic Systems

Most agent frameworks are built around the language model: a conversation loop comes first, then tools, then rules, and finally a logging layer bolted on for observability, with state persisted as retrievable "memory." We describe ActiveGraph, a runtime that inverts this arrangement. The append-only event log is the source of truth; the working graph is a deterministic projection of that log; and behaviors--ordinary functions, classes, LLM-backed routines, or logic attached to typed edges--react to changes in the graph and emit new events. No component instructs another; coordination happens entirely through the shared graph. This single design decision yields three properties that retrieval-and-summarization memory systems do not provide: deterministic replay of any run from its log, cheap forking that branches a run at any event without re-executing the shared prefix, and end-to-end lineage from a high-level goal down to the individual model call that produced each artifact. We present the architecture, a determinism contract that makes replay sound, and a worked diligence example whose full causal structure is reconstructable from the log alone. We discuss--without claiming to demonstrate--why this substrate is unusually well suited to self-improving agents, and how it extends the BabyAGI lineage and prior graph-memory research.
May 18, 2026cs.CV

MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agents

Recent GUI agents have made substantial progress in visual grounding and action prediction, yet they remain brittle in long-horizon tasks that require maintaining task state across many interface transitions. Existing agents typically rely on raw history replay or text-only memory, which either overwhelms the model with redundant screenshots or discards localized visual evidence needed for future decisions. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{MementoGUI}, a plug-in agentic memory framework that equips MLLM-based GUI agents with \textbf{MementoCore}, a learned controller for online memory selection, compression, and retrieval. Rather than treating interaction history as a fixed context, MementoGUI formulates long-horizon GUI control as an online memory-control problem: working memory selectively preserves task-relevant interface events with textual summaries and ROI-level visual evidence, while episodic memory retrieves reusable past trajectories through learned relevance selection. MementoCore modularizes memory control into specialized operators for step processing, memory compression, episodic writing, and episodic selection, enabling plug-in memory augmentation without finetuning the GUI agent backbone. We further develop a scalable data curation pipeline that converts computer-use trajectories into memory-controller training data, introduce \textbf{MementoGUI-Bench} for evaluating long-horizon decision-making in GUI agents, and design MLLM-based metrics for semantic action matching, task progress, and memory consistency. Experiments on GUI-Odyssey, MM-Mind2Web, and MementoGUI-Bench show that MementoGUI consistently improves GUI agents over no-history, history-replay, and text-only memory baselines, with larger MementoCore backbones further strengthening memory-augmented GUI control.
May 17, 2026cs.AI

NeuSymMS: A Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Memory System for Persistent, Self-Curating LLM Agents

We present NeuSymMS, an adaptive memory system that enables large language model (LLM) agents to learn, remember, and reason about users across sessions via a hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture. NeuSymMS couples neural fact extraction from unstructured dialogue using LLMs and a CLIPS-based expert system that classifies, deduplicates, and reconciles facts under explicit lifecycle rules. The system represents knowledge as subject-relation-value triples stored in relational database management system. It supports user/agents/agent-to-agent scoping, and implements a dual-horizon (short-term and long-term) memory model. IT leverages access-based promotion and time-based pruning of the memory on both horizpons. NeuSymMS maintains continuity of memory while avoiding context-window bloat and cross-entity contamination. We argue that this architecture offers a practical path to trustworthy, auditable memory for production agentic systems and discuss its novelty relative to log retrieval, summarization, and key-value approaches.
May 17, 2026cs.SE

MemRepair: Hierarchical Memory for Agentic Repository-Level Vulnerability Repair

Modern software ecosystems face a rapidly growing number of disclosed vulnerabilities, increasing the need for automated repair techniques that can operate reliably at repository scale. Although Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have recently shown promise for automated vulnerability repair (AVR), most existing systems still treat repair as a single generation step over the currently visible code context. As a result, they lack a persistent mechanism for reusing prior fixes or learning from failed validation attempts, which limits their effectiveness on complex, multi-file repair tasks. We present MemRepair, a memory-augmented agentic framework that formulates vulnerability repair as an iterative, experience-driven process. MemRepair combines three complementary memory layers, i.e., History-Fix, Security-Pattern, and Refinement-Trajectory memories, with a dynamic feedback-driven refinement loop. This design allows the agent to retrieve repository-specific repair conventions, apply reusable security defenses, and exploit prior "failure-to-success" trajectories to revise semantically invalid patches based on runtime evidence. We evaluate MemRepair on three representative repository-level vulnerability repair benchmarks: SEC-Bench, PatchEval (Python, Go, JavaScript), and the C++ subset of Multi-SWE-bench. MemRepair achieves state-of-the-art resolution rates of 58.0%, 58.2%, and 30.58%, respectively, outperforming strong general-purpose agents such as OpenHands and SWE-agent, as well as the specialized AVR tool InfCode-C++, while maintaining competitive repair cost. These results show that persistent, hierarchical repair memory can substantially improve the reliability of agentic vulnerability repair across diverse languages and repository settings.