Memory-Augmented Agents

Long-horizon agents accumulate growing contexts during interaction, impairing performance and stability. Compact memory mitigates this problem by compressing and rewriting the history retained between model invocations. Learning what to retain typically relies on proximal policy optimization (PPO) with final task rewards, but sparse rewards provide little guidance for individual memory updates. This limitation motivates on-policy distillation (OPD), which supplies dense teacher supervision on student rollouts. For such supervision to be valid, the teacher must evaluate each sampled action under the same state in which it was generated. However, the context rewriting performed during memory compression can break this alignment. When sampled responses are retained and re-encoded for later invocations, flattening the interaction into a persistent history may cause the teacher to score the action under a state that the student never visited during rollout. The action therefore remains on-policy by provenance, but not necessarily by state. We therefore propose Memory-Aligned On-Policy Distillation (MemOPD). MemOPD records the inputs and sampled outputs of each model invocation, restores its original token positions and causal visibility, and packs the reconstructed invocations for efficient teacher scoring. The teacher provides full-vocabulary supervision at the sampled action positions, while PPO preserves the final task objective. Experiments verify state alignment across several context updates and show that it improves F1 by 7.0% over persistent-history teacher scoring in a matched control. Overall, MemOPD-3B improves F1 over PPO by up to 416.2%, while packing yields up to a 1.63x speedup in actor computation during training. The code for this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/TPssp/MemOPD.

Long-horizon agents rely on memory to reuse experiences, yet existing memory systems often assume that evidence can be directly consumed through a fixed representation. This leads to representation mismatch, where relevant information is available but not organized for the current decision. To this end, we propose MemPrism, a task-conditioned relational memory framework that separates persistent experience storage from decision-time working memory. MemPrism records interactions as the event stream and dynamically constructs relational views according to the current task context. A lightweight view policy selects the relation structure, evidence range, outcome condition, and granularity, while a deterministic composer and render transform historical facts into a temporary optical working-memory view for a frozen task policy. Experiments on long-horizon embodied and web-agent benchmarks show that MemPrism consistently improves the task performance, especially as trajectories become longer, while reducing memory token consumption. Furthermore, the learned view policy transfers across different VLMs without additional adaptation, demonstrating the effectiveness of task-conditioned relational views as a general memory interface for agents.

Embodied visuomotor models, including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have demonstrated promising performance on robotic manipulation benchmarks. However, their potential remains fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of large-scale embodied trajectory datasets, leading to insufficient compositional generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios with limited capability to capture reusable skill structures. To address this limitation, we propose Skill-Based Memory (SkillMemo) framework that implicitly decomposes long-horizon demonstrations into latent atomic skills and integrates skill-level features into a dynamic episodic memory bank for solving compositional tasks. Specifically, we first introduce an expert-guided trajectory segmentation module built upon a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which implicitly partitions trajectories into distinct skill primitives represented by learned gating coefficients. We further design a skill-level episodic memory architecture that stores compact skill representations as retrievable key-value pairs. During inference, the memory bank retrieves the most relevant skill primitives which are subsequently fused with the model's current gating distribution, providing a robust contextual prior to refine action predictions. Extensive experiments on the simulation benchmark and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SkillMemo consistently enhances both DP and VLA backbones, achieving state-of-the-art performance and outperforming $π_{0.5}$, while exhibiting strong compositional generalization to unseen task configurations.

As capabilities rapidly increase, AI agents can move from running inside one app to acting across a user's devices over time. Yet existing agent systems still fall short in this scenario. This is because observations are scattered across devices and moments, but mainstream systems are not designed around this fact: a single agent that treats devices as tools lacks effective state management for all devices across time, and multi-agent systems coordinate across agents but do not maintain the compact carried state a cross-device, cross-time request needs. We argue that the agent should maintain an effectively designed state that organizes engagement evidence, stated facts, and the standing request in a compact, action-ready form for deciding its action given the current observation. To compare state designs, we construct a benchmark of user-agent interaction across devices and time. We instantiate this principle in Unified Agent, a stateful agent that carries interaction evidence across devices and moments and uses it with the current observation to act. In the default setting, it significantly outperforms our adaptations of four published designs. Across changes in multimodal large language model (MLLM) family, capability, and reasoning effort, it remains ahead of all compared systems, demonstrating that the state-design advantage is robust across MLLM settings. Our code and data will be publicly available on GitHub.

Long-horizon embodied task requires agents to act under partial observability while preserving both scene belief and execution progress. Flat histories or implicit policy states may contain past observations, but they do not provide an explicit interface for deciding which world facts support the currently active goal. We introduce Mimir, a neuro-symbolic memory that separates world memory from task memory and dynamically grounds them before each action. World memory maintains object locations, object states, and perceptual evidence, while task memory maintains an ordered goal agenda, progress state, hand state, failures, and execution constraints. A grounding module binds the active goal to recalled world candidates, fills missing source locations, and attaches evidence before planning and embodiment-specific execution. Across tested backbones, Mimir consistently improves on different EB-ALFRED and EB-Habitat tasks, with maximum gains of 42.5% and average gains of 23.0%, respectively. Compared with the best results among prior agent and memory systems evaluated under the same backbone, Mimir improves the overall average success rate by 8.5%. Finally, on the EB-Habitat Long-horizon subset, Mimir achieves 86.0% success rate, substantially outperforming current closed-source models. Our code will be released soon.

Self-improving agents accumulate reusable insights from prior trajectories, making retrieval increasingly important for turning accumulated experience into actionable guidance. At each decision step, retrieving the right insight can help the agent progress toward its goal, a setting we refer to as agentic insight retrieval. However, existing retrieval methods primarily model semantic similarity, while overlooking whether a retrieved insight resolves the agent's current decision bottleneck. We propose InsightEmb, a contrastive embedding framework that learns transferable progress-oriented retrieval geometry using only mathematical reasoning data. InsightEmb jointly learns to align concrete situations with abstract heuristic rules and to cluster reasoning trajectories with similar progress structures. We evaluate InsightEmb on dynamic agent tasks and a static skill-retrieval benchmark. Without any environment-specific training, InsightEmb improves over all these evaluations, surpassing the performance of existing reasoning embedding models. These results suggest that the geometry of state-insight matching can transfer across domains, enabling effective training from publicly available reasoning data without expensive environment-specific supervision.

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.

A wearable assistant should both answer questions about its visual history and recognize when that history is useful to the present situation. Existing video-memory systems primarily support question-conditioned recall, whereas proactive assistants typically use separate memory and control mechanisms. We introduce GROVE, a training-free framework that supports both behaviors with one memory grown causally from a continuous video stream. GROVE retains fine-grained perceptual evidence and incrementally consolidates it into time-stamped moments, coherent episodes, and recurring cross-day patterns. Each stratum is paired with a scale-native retrieval skill for locating an observation, replaying an activity, or traversing long-range regularities. Reactive QA and proactive assistance share this memory and access interface, differing in whether retrieval is initiated by a user query or the current situation. Across multiple benchmarks including the challenging MM-lifelong and EgoServe, GROVE achieves the best results among the compared methods. Controlled ablations show that the temporal strata and their access skills are complementary, with patterns providing the largest benefit when evidence spans multiple days. Code will be available at https://github.com/SitongGong/GROVE.

Data drift poses significant challenges for machine learning systems in production, requiring continuous model updates to maintain performance. We present KC-Agent, a dual-process cognitive architecture for automated ML model improvement that combines fast pattern recognition (System 1) with deliberate incremental updates (System 2). Our approach implements structured memory systems enabling System 1 to leverage successful solutions previously discovered by System 2, achieving efficient pattern-based responses without costly re-computation. KC-Agent incorporates atomic change principles and rollback capabilities to ensure reliable, verifiable updates in production environments. We evaluate our method on five datasets including real-world NASA turbofan data with authentic temporal degradation and synthetic datasets with controlled drift scenarios. KC-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance (76.8% accuracy) while maintaining optimal efficiency (13.2s execution time), outperforming established cognitive architectures: CodeAct (+2.4%), Tree of Thoughts (+3.6%), ReAct (+8.0%), and Reflexion (+8.9%). Consensus evaluation by a panel of state-of-the-art LLMs confirms superior strategic efficacy (8.33/10 Smartness score), significantly outperforming baseline agents. The knowledge consolidation mechanism delivers 91% speedup over the slow variant while maintaining higher accuracy. Our approach demonstrates both theoretical foundations and practical viability for cognitive-inspired automated ML improvement systems capable of handling complex real-world data drift scenarios.

Long-term memory enables LLM agents to retain useful information across sessions, but also creates an attack surface through which adversaries may poison an agent's persistent memory to steer its behavior. Existing memory poisoning attacks mainly rely on individually malicious records, overlooking a compositional threat: multiple benign-looking memories may jointly induce unsafe behavior. In this paper, we introduce MemCollusion, an automated red-teaming framework for constructing collusive memory poisoning attacks. MemCollusion applies salami tactics---a strategy that slices an adversarial objective into small, individually innocuous pieces---to generate memory fragments that are individually benign looking but collectively harmful. It constructs memory coalitions using four design constraints, five theory-informed strategies, and a fine-tuned generator. To assess collusive memory poisoning in a realistic cross-session setting, we develop MoltLab, a controlled research reproduction of Moltbook, in which crafted platform content must first be observed and distilled into persistent memory before influencing the agent's behavior in a separate session. We evaluate MemCollusion on OpenClaw using two backbone models across 48 scenarios. Under the strongest memory-saving setting, MemCollusion achieves an average Memory Save Rate of 81.3% and an Attack Success Rate of 75.0%, and remains effective under both benign memory dilution and memory-level defenses.

Agents are increasingly expected to act not only as task executors, but also as decision-makers on behalf of human users. This shift requires agents to accumulate evidence over long horizons, interpret implicit user preferences, and compare multiple candidates under partial observations. In this work, we propose DunphyBench, a new benchmark for evaluating agents on long-horizon human-centered embodied decision-making, where the agent must navigate through multiple embodied housing environments and make decisions that align with multi-dimensional human preferences. Unlike standard embodied reasoning tasks that often focus on procedural planning or immediate goal completion, our setting requires agents to integrate multimodal, multi-source input into coherent knowledge that supports complex reasoning across long horizon. The evaluation results reveal that there is a substantial gap between current agents and human performance. Furthermore, our diagnosis of state-of-the-art VLM-driven agents reveals that memory management is one of the bottlenecks, where raw multimodal history introduces noise that hinders decision quality. Motivated by this finding, we design MeMento, a preference-conditioned multimodal memory compressor that selectively compresses decision-relevant information from long-horizon history based on user preferences with a fixed set of memory tokens. Experiments show that MeMento helps VLM-driven agents improve accuracy by 7.18%, while reducing memory usage by 85.38% compared to the strongest baseline.

Lifelong LLM agents increasingly adapt through external learning states that store past interactions as retrievable memories or reusable skills, yet existing benchmarks rarely account for how the path of accumulated experience shapes what agents transfer and retain. In this work, we establish PATH-Bench, a benchmark for path-dependent evaluation of lifelong agents. PATH-Bench estimates directed task relationships via multi-model in-context learning, constructs probe-centered sequences with controlled helpful and interfering histories, and repeatedly evaluates probe tasks to measure average performance, forward transfer, backward transfer, and forgetting. We evaluate eight representative agents on single-turn code generation and multi-turn tool-use tasks under positive- and negative-dominant histories. Benchmark results show that experience utility depends jointly on how experience is represented and on the task's interaction structure, that strong transfer does not ensure retention, and that later experience can reshape gains acquired earlier in the learning path. Based on these findings, we propose Selective Experience Use (SEU), an agent harness that regulates how path-accumulated experience influences each new task, admitting helpful items while filtering out potential interference. SEU consistently reduces forgetting while improving forward transfer in the majority of settings. The PATH-Bench provides both a controlled evaluation framework and actionable guidance for designing more selective and robust lifelong agents.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables robots to follow instructions in previously unseen environments. Recently, a training-free paradigm has emerged: the robot queries a multimodal LLM to understand its observations and plan the next action. However, long-horizon navigation based on either image streams or dense map inevitably introduces a growing memory and reasoning bottleneck. We present HAM-VLN, a decision-coupled, agent-authored memory that equips the robot with a persistent, depth-grounded world graph. In the same model call used to select the next action, HAM-VLN also records semantic and reflective information---including room type, objects, navigation progress, and failure notes. Recent waypoints remain verbatim within a bounded window, while older history re-enters the context only through retrieval scored by relevance, recency, and salience, together with one-hop topological expansion. This design requires no additional LLM calls beyond the per-waypoint decision. Compared to previous methods, HAM-VLN not only improves various navigation metrics but also reduces the context length by more than 65%. Specifically, HAM-VLN achieves 61.0% Success Rate (SR) on VLN-CE R2R, 52.7% SR on VLN-CE RxR, and 79.7% SR on HM3D-v2 ObjectNav without any training.

Existing multimodal long-term memory agents use external memory to overcome the limited context available for long videos. However, most methods emphasize what to store rather than how stored memory should be retrieved. When retrieval becomes inaccurate or repeatedly fails to obtain useful evidence, existing agents lack mechanisms to diagnose failures from previous task trajectories and adapt future search strategies.We introduce Reflective Retrieval Memory (RRM), a reflective memory framework for long-horizon multimodal reasoning. RRM augments an entity-centric multimodal memory graph with reflective experience memory, which distills transferable procedural retrieval knowledge from historical task trajectories. Unlike episodic and semantic memories that preserve factual evidence from the current video, reflective experience memory captures reusable search strategies across tasks. RRM converts retrieved experiences into query-level guidance, while answer generation remains conditioned only on factual evidence newly retrieved from the current video. A lifecycle management mechanism further regulates experience memory through usage frequency, reuse feedback, and temporal decay, thereby reducing redundancy and noise. RRM consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on M3-Bench-Robot, M3-Bench-Web, and Video-MME-Long, demonstrating the effectiveness of reflective retrieval memory for long-horizon multimodal reasoning.

Recent advancements in inference-time scaling have significantly unlocked the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, for agents, these approaches suffer from a critical inefficiency, operating in a stateless manner and engaging in redundant search processes. Existing memory mechanisms largely rely on the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, leading to prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, \textit{GAMER}(Graph-based Action-centric Memory with Episodic Reasoning), that bridges the gap between inference scaling and episodic memory. Our approach models historical reasoning as a dynamic \textit{Action-Centric Graph}. By decoupling the memory mechanism from LLMs, our method can save token/money usage by providing less memory context than memory mechanism baselines. To extract knowledge from the graph effectively, we use a dual-stream Temporal Difference learning mechanism to estimate the positive(suggestion) and negative~(avoidance) value of action nodes based on past successes and failures. During the inference phase, this learned value function optimizes decision-making bi-directionally, so that positive values provide action suggestions, while negative values indicate high-risk actions. By performing efficient searches on the graph, our method significantly improves the efficiency of inference scaling. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that \textit{GAMER} achieves superior performance by \textbf{20.81%/6.17%} for success/progress rate compared to vanilla baselines.

Large language model (LLM) agents may recover from a failure within an episode or after a retry, yet the same execution failure can recur in later tasks because post-episode feedback rarely revises the persistent harness that guides future interactions. Static harnesses improve reliability through fixed tools, context, memory, and workflow structures, but remain unchanged after deployment. We propose $\textbf{Living-Harness}$, a self-evolving agent harness that converts each completed trajectory and its evaluator signals into posterior evidence for bounded harness updates. Guided by a domain-level $\textbf{Evolution-SOP}$ ($\textbf{S}$tandard $\textbf{O}$perating $\textbf{P}$rocedure), Living-Harness extracts an episode abstraction and structured update evidence, and writes two complementary forms of procedural knowledge: episodic memory that records trigger conditions, failure patterns, and recovery actions, and a state graph that records state nodes, repair edges, and transition rules. The updated harness state is retrieved to guide future interactions, while tools and base context remain frozen, allowing procedural repairs to accumulate across evolution cycles. On eight interactive environments derived from $τ^2$-Bench and MultiWOZ-2.4, Living-Harness improves average Pass@1 over the strongest interactive baseline by 10.07 and 9.91 percentage points, respectively, and supports retrieval-only reuse of the evolved harness state across model backbones. Our code will be made publicly available soon at https://github.com/anotherbricki/Living-Harness.

We present Voice Memory, a inference-only scheme for agentic speech recognition: at stream time, a frozen corrector reads a single per-domain memory.md and decides per utterance whether to act on the hypothesis or abstain and keep the 1-best. Asynchronously, a score-gated optimizer revises that file through bounded edits, accepting an edit only when it strictly improves a held-out score. Extended from classical ASR-LM framework, we refer this split the listener-thinker architecture; the two roles are coupled only through the memory, so no weights change and the learned skill stays auditable and portable. Restraint turns out to be the operative skill this loop discovers: unconstrained generative error correction (GER) over-corrects, breaking correct tokens on up to 64% of its edits on financial news, and Voice Memory, reduces this rate to 35%. Across ten HyPoradise domains with an open corrector, Voice Memory, lowers weighted word error rate from 8.36% to 7.52% (7.47% with three added in-context examples) without regressing any dataset below its 1-best baseline; gains concentrate where recoverable headroom is largest, including air-travel commands (8.40% to 3.40%) and noisy far-field speech (CHiME-4, 12.69% to 10.46%). The memory transfers across corrector families and adds zero parameters to the inference path. A demo and example code are provided for future studies.

A robot carrying a persistent, behavior-annotated map faces two planning questions, and its memory answers only one well. The \emph{spatial-navigation} question -- how to walk around a room -- we address first and report a negative: building on Vision--Language--Motion Maps (VLMM), a behavior-aware planner cost cuts a planning-time objective by $\sim$35% over 28 AI2-THOR scenes, but under closed-loop execution the real benefit nearly vanishes ($\sim$4%) and an on-demand vision--language model (VLM) does as well. The \emph{resource-allocation} question differs: under a limited perception budget, what should the robot re-observe now to keep its map fresh? Framing re-perception as this attention decision, we show a persistent map's memory (change-history, or even just recency of last sighting) yields the best schedule (held-out), matching an oracle, while the memoryless VLM prior is poor. Because the schedule reallocates budget toward what matters, memory's benefit concentrates on the important objects ($\sim$1.6$\times$ the mean), and a downstream fetch task confirms fewer wasted trips; the gain grows with per-instance heterogeneity exactly as a Cauchy--Schwarz bound predicts -- it equals $\mathrm{Var}(\sqrtλ)$, the variance of root-volatility. With a real CLIP prior on rendered objects the advantage is $+21$--$26\%$. The map's distinctive value appears when the task is \emph{language-conditioned}: told what to track, VLMM grounds the relevant objects (open-vocabulary) and tracks their change (memory), beating even a strong relevance-weighted recency baseline ($+2.5\%$) -- so its motion channel adds value beyond a last-seen timestamp -- and an on-demand VLM ($+8.9\%$); neither language nor dynamics alone suffices. The map earns its keep not by telling the robot how to walk around a room, but by telling it what to pay attention to.

Manipulating objects with hidden internal state, such as a latched microwave, forces a robot to probe before it can act. Yet a robot that has solved an instance once re-runs the same probes whenever it encounters that instance again, because existing cross-episode memories target task success and organize reuse around states, not the object or the cost of re-exploring it. We present Instance-Oriented Memory (IOM), an object-centric framework that amortizes this exploration: from a single encounter that uncovers the hidden state, whether or not it succeeds, IOM records a short procedure for manipulating that instance, keys it on the object's identifiable features, and injects it as a soft bias on a procedure-conditioned policy. A later encounter recognizes the object and recalls its procedure instead of re-exploring. We instantiate this distillation with an off-the-shelf vision-language model (VLM) that parses each encounter into the procedure without task-specific training. Across four articulated-object tasks, two in simulation (microwave, door) and two on a real robot (bottle, cabinet), an oracle procedure memory cuts manipulation operations by 16-30% over re-exploration at non-regressing success, and the VLM instantiation recovers 69-88% of that saving out of the box. Because the procedure is a soft bias on a feedback-driven policy, an incorrect memory is recovered from rather than obeyed: success holds even when a retrieved procedure is wrong, as for $\approx$12% of door instances. Across all tasks the benefit is purely one of efficiency: success never regresses, and on the real robot even improves. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Multi-hop question answering requires coordinating relational and textual evidence across reasoning steps, a combination neither a text corpus nor a knowledge graph can supply alone. Prior work often emphasizes only part of this loop: graph-augmented RAG retrieves from a pre-built or query-updated graph, KGQA systems search within topic-centered subgraphs, and memory-augmented agents maintain evolving memories without continuously reconciling graph memory with textual context. We propose Co-E, a training-free system built around synchronized bidirectional graph-text working memory. A synchronization cycle consolidates textual memory, extracts relational triples into graph memory, and injects graph facts back into the generation context. Because both memories are maintained, they shape subsequent retrieval and generation. Evaluated on six multi-hop QA benchmarks, Co-E improves over comparable training-free open-backbone baselines and is competitive with larger or trained systems.

Materials research advances through accumulated experience - scripts that work, protocols that are trusted, warnings attached to failed calculations or experiments, and judgement that links a new question to an old result. This experience is essential for reproducibility and knowledge transfer, yet it is usually fragmented across notebooks, repositories, job logs and individual memory, and it is rarely portable across artificial-intelligence agents. Here we argue that a lifelong AI partner for materials science can be designed around persistent memory rather than around a particular agent implementation. We introduce a self-evolving memory framework that stores scientific experience as inspectable facts and executable skills, so that observations, failure boundaries, protocols and validation checks can be retrieved, revised and migrated across models. We evaluate the idea in three computational settings that expose different layers of materials-research competence. In 49 real-world materials-tool-use questions comprising 138 executable subtasks, memory nearly doubles GPT-5.2 task success without model-parameter updates. In elemental-solid equation-of-state calculations, memory converts a wavefunction-initialization failure into a pre-execution guardrail, improving outcomes from 22/1/4 to 25/2/0 Correct/Partial/Error and avoiding 92% of repeated errors. In 13 practical material simulation workflows, remembered skills and failure facts halve the aggregate trace burden (tokens) and reduce tool calls by over a factor of two by the third round, while preserving physically meaningful outputs in band-gap, phonon, vacancy and work-function analyses. These results show that agent memory can serve as a durable scientific asset; a portable, self-improving record of materials-research experience that outlives any single model or agent stack.

Benchmarks for LLM-agent memory typically generate conversations first and extract answer keys afterwards -- with documented label-error and contamination problems -- and they overwhelmingly measure short interaction histories. We invert the pipeline: a seeded life-script sampler emits facts with validity intervals, volatility classes, and source channels before any text exists; an LLM renderer writes chat and email from per-event fact manifests; a fidelity verifier confirms every planted fact; and questions are instantiated mechanically from the script, so gold answers are script-valid by construction and separately validated for answerability. The synthetic, fictionalized corpus (~380 questions, 15 types) embeds features absent from the benchmarks we survey: per-fact validity intervals, sent/received trust distinctions, injection probes in a benign harness, and as-of-date question sets. Benchmarking five memory architectures against a no-memory control (fixed answerer, versioned LLM judge, three replicates, two horizons), we find backend rankings invert with history length: the budgeted curated-map memory that leads at three weeks loses recall of evicted content by nine weeks (96% to 72%) while a provenance-typed graph rises to 90%; the inversion is positive for all six users under complete cross-family re-judging (exact p=0.031). A full-rendered-history baseline ties or exceeds the best memory system at the short horizon but shows no judge-independent advantage at nine weeks, at about twice the read cost. Write-stage quality strongly correlates with downstream quality (weakly-written facts fail 24% vs 2%), and injection resistance tracked whether provenance boundaries survive representation. A layered architecture performs best among the memory systems in both regimes (96.8% short-horizon) and is released as Veracium, an open-source library, with the corpus generator and harness.

Deep research requires agents to find answers that jointly satisfy multiple constraints. Discovering such answers is costly, whereas verifying a candidate can often be decomposed into tractable constraint-wise checks. This discovery--verification asymmetry suggests that a research agent should do more than simply search longer: it should recursively improve its current answer by verifying intermediate results and using the partially verified state to guide subsequent refinement. We introduce AREX, a family of Recursively Self-Improving (RSI) deep research agents. AREX alternates between an inner research loop that gathers evidence and constructs a provisional answer, and an outer self-improvement loop that audits the answer constraint-wise, identifies unresolved claims, and launches targeted follow-up research. To sustain RSI over long horizons, AREX learns an autonomous context-update tool that compresses growing interaction history into a compact improvement state preserving verified evidence and unresolved constraints, without relying on an external model. We train AREX on verified synthetic tasks and high-quality trajectories through agentic mid-training and long-horizon reinforcement learning. To mitigate sparse final rewards during long horizon learning, we emphasize key steps where decisive evidence is acquired or erroneous research directions are corrected. We instantiate a dense 4B model and a 122B-A10B Mixture-of-Experts model. Across BrowseComp, WideSearch, DeepSearchQA, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), and other reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, AREX substantially outperforms comparable-scale baselines and remains competitive with models using substantially more activated parameters.

Image restoration agents have recently emerged as a flexible paradigm for handling diverse and unpredictable degradations in real-world scenarios. Existing agents typically formulate restoration as a tool-using process, where the agent perceives degradations, searches candidate tools, executes restoration operations, and revises the plan through reflection or rollback. However, their knowledge is often stored as static tool descriptions, manually defined degradation priors, or unstructured textual summaries, which limits the accumulation, verification, revision, and forgetting of restoration knowledge over long-term experience. In this paper, we propose Causal-AgentIR, a hierarchical multi-agent framework with self-evolving causal memory for collective image restoration intelligence. Instead of representing restoration experience as isolated textual records, Causal-AgentIR organizes degradation patterns, image regions, restoration tools, actions, quality changes, and user preferences into a structured causal memory graph. This graph supports graph-based retrieval and multi-hop causal reasoning, enabling agents to infer how specific restoration operations or tool sequences affect restoration quality under different degradation conditions. The framework further organizes multiple agents into a collaborative system, including planning, degradation analysis, tool expertise, causal memory reasoning, outcome critique, and memory curation. Through this design, restoration experience can be added, updated, merged, reinforced, ignored, or discarded according to observed quality changes and feedback, allowing the agent to maintain reliable and transferable restoration knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Dynamic manufacturing environments require multi-agent systems to coordinate effectively under frequent operational disturbances such as machine failures, urgent job arrivals, and processing time variations. Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches treat each disturbance episode independently, discarding valuable coordination experience that could accelerate future adaptation. In this paper, we propose a Graph-Structured Experiential Memory (GSEM) framework for multi-agent coordination in dynamic manufacturing. The framework encodes historical coordination episodes as heterogeneous relational graphs that capture task dependencies, machine states, and inter-agent collaboration patterns. When a new disturbance occurs, a graph neural network-based retrieval mechanism identifies structurally similar past episodes, enabling experience-guided policy adaptation rather than learning from scratch. Experiments on dynamic flexible job-shop scheduling benchmarks with three disturbance types show that GSEM reduces makespan by 4.1%-10.0% and adaptation time by 33%-38% compared to the strongest memory-augmented baseline, with the advantage increasing under higher disturbance frequency. Ablation studies and cross-disturbance transfer experiments further validate the necessity of graph-structured encoding and similarity-based retrieval and demonstrate the cross-disturbance generalizability of learned coordination patterns.

Self-improving AI systems typically treat the agent as the object that improves, by optimizing prompts, workflows, harnesses, or even the agent's own code. This agent-centric view can make improvements expensive to maintain and difficult to transfer, because gains become tied to a particular agent design, task distribution, or adaptation run. We study a complementary paradigm: knowledge-centric self-improvement, in which agents remain generic and disposable while the persistent object is a curated knowledge base that agents can leverage for future tasks. We conduct controlled case studies to operationalize this idea via a simple protocol. Agents attempt one task, then contribute evidence-grounded insights to a shared knowledge base via task-level and cross-task forums, followed by knowledge distillation. Because self-improvement is contained in the knowledge rather than the agent, improvement can be more inspectable, transferable, and portable. Across abstract reasoning, coding, and terminal benchmarks, this protocol improves solve rates while reducing dollar cost relative to agent-centric baselines. The resulting distilled knowledge also transfers to held-out tasks and across LLM families, indicating that the improvement is not merely an LLM- or run-specific behavior. These results support a new view of self-improving agentic systems: progress can be driven primarily by the curated persistent knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/recursive-knowledge/KSI.

Partially observable reinforcement learning requires deciding what to retain, retrieve, and forget over time. We introduce a neuro-symbolic meta-policy that learns which symbolic memory heuristic to apply at each decision point while keeping execution symbolic. Our setting uses temporal knowledge-graph memory in RoomKG, where hidden state and observations are represented as Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs and memory is augmented with temporal RDF triple annotations. The model combines knowledge-graph encoding of memory contents with value heads for question answering, exploration, and forgetting, yielding a controller that is both adaptive and inspectable. This gives the work a direct Semantic Web grounding through RDF-based representation, annotation-compatible graph semantics, and graph-based symbolic operations over explicit memory state. On train/test room splits at long-term memory capacity of 512, the qualifier-aware StarE-GNN configuration achieves the best held-out performance among the compared symbolic, neural, and neuro-symbolic systems while preserving step-level traceability of memory-management decisions.

Communication-limited robots in mission-critical scenarios such as disaster inspection and search-and-rescue must make reliable onboard decisions without access to remote operators or high-capacity reasoning services. Episodic memory reuse is an attractive low-cost fallback, but retrieval similarity does not guarantee execution validity, i.e., a retrieved action may match the current context yet be unsafe due to changed topology, insufficient battery margin, or unreliable prior outcomes. We call such high-similarity but execution-invalid episodes memory traps. This creates a safety-efficiency design space where similarity only reuse minimizes fallback cost but can be unsafe, while always invoking local reasoning improves safety at high computational and energy cost. This paper presents MemoGuard, a lightweight adaptive runtime that validates episodic memories against topology, resource, and outcome contracts before reuse, invoking fallback only when validation fails. In a graph-based corridor-inspection simulator, MemoGuard reduces battery safety violations by 76.6% over similarity-only top-1 reuse while reducing fallback calls by 21.4% over always reasoning. On an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with local llama3.2:3b fallback reasoning, this corresponds to 3.67 s and 36.97 J of avoided fallback-reasoning overhead per trial. We open-source MemoGuard at https://github.com/hetheiin/memoguard.

A growing class of agentic systems maintain persistent state across sessions through memory files, behavioral preferences, and knowledge bases. While this makes agents more useful and self-improving, it also creates a new attack surface for prompt injections in which malicious instructions can be embedded within persistent files and influence future behavior. In this work, we study prompt injection attacks in memory-based agentic systems using a sandboxed synthetic workspace. We evaluate two agentic systems, Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, across four models: Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.2, and GPT-5.5. Our results show that although it is difficult to make an agent overwrite its own memory files using untrusted external content, payloads already planted in those files can successfully attack current and future sessions. Attack success and payload persistence vary substantially across systems, models, adversarial goals, and multi-session attack sequences. These findings show that persistent memory changes the threat model for prompt injection and motivate defenses that protect memory updates without removing useful agent adaptation.

Embodied agents accumulate experience over time. We study how accumulated experience can be formed into persistent memory for future reasoning and action. We formulate Embodied Action Memory (EAM) as the capability to form and use memory over embodied experience, together with the persistent memory state produced by that process. We introduce MEMORA, a framework that instantiates EAM through a formation-consolidation-retrieval lifecycle and a multi-store world-memory architecture. MEMORA organizes experience into participant-specific Environment, Entity, Activity, and Inferred Knowledge stores: online editing revises memory as new evidence arrives, while offline consolidation abstracts repeated experience into reusable routines, habits, and preferences. We evaluate MEMORA with MEMORA-Bench, a 45-hour egocentric-video suite that measures both retrospective memory faithfulness and prospective memory-grounded planning. Across four open-weight answer models, MEMORA achieves the strongest aggregate planning performance among the evaluated memory interfaces, with its largest gains on out-of-distribution planning. On these tasks, MEMORA improves Robot-Grounded Plan score by up to 16.6 percent, suggesting that memory formed and consolidated across experience can support planning for new goals beyond directly observed episodes. A physical-robot demonstration further shows that memory formed solely from human egocentric video can ground high-level robot plans in participant-specific objects and preferences. Project website: https://github.com/yuzihaowashu/MEMORA