Overview

Memory-augmented agents study how AI systems can retain and use information beyond the current prompt or observation, helping them handle long tasks, partial observability, and changing user or world states. Approaches range from episodic, semantic, and procedural stores—often organized as graphs, event records, or compressed visual and action histories—to learned policies that decide what to write, retrieve, update, or forget. Work spans embodied control and navigation, GUI and web use, dialogue, coding, and research, with evaluations including RoboMemArena, RoboMME, GOAT-Bench, LongMemEval, and software-engineering benchmarks. A central tension is that more memory can improve transfer and continuity but also introduce stale or misleading evidence, interference, cost, privacy leaks, and persistent attacks, making selective retrieval and longitudinal safety evaluation important open problems.

Latest papers

349 papers64 papers in the last four weeks, up 60% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

May 27, 2026

Long Live the Librarian! A Persistent Search Sub-Agent for Energy-Efficient Multi-Agent Software Engineering Systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have substantially advanced autonomous software engineering (SWE), but their growing inference energy demands raise sustainability concerns. In this paper, we demonstrate that this cost is concentrated in an overlooked source: redundant output tokens generated across agents. Two empirical findings ground this claim. First, our per-token energy attribution for MAS reveals a sharp asymmetry: an output token consumes 30 to 1,000 times more energy than an input or cached token. Second, MAS inflate per-episode output because agents repeatedly re-explore overlapping repository regions. To address this inefficiency, we propose Librarian, a persistent search sub-agent that tracks repository-search history and suppresses redundant exploration actions across agents. By returning short references to file regions instead of full file excerpts, Librarian further reduces output-token volume. On SWE-Bench Verified and SWE-Bench-Live, Librarian reduces per-episode GPU energy consumption of existing multi-agent SWE systems by 11 to 30% while preserving task performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-postech/Librarian.
May 25, 2026

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, 2026

From Model Scaling to System Scaling: Scaling the Harness in Agentic AI

This paper studies the next major bottleneck in agentic AI as system scaling, not only model scaling: the design of auditable, persistent, modular, and verifiable architectures around foundation models. We refer to this shift as scaling the harness: treating the structured execution layer around a foundation model as a first-class object of design, evaluation, and optimization. Although recent large language models enable agents to use tools, retrieve information, maintain memory, and execute long-horizon workflows, evaluation remains largely model-centric, often reducing agents to final-task success while treating memory, retrieval, tool use, orchestration, verification, and governance as secondary implementation details. This framing is increasingly inadequate because agent performance emerges from the interaction among the foundation model, memory substrate, context constructor, skill-routing layer, orchestration loop, and verification-and-governance layer. Together, these components form the agent harness, which translates model capability into long-horizon agent behavior. We study scaling the harness through three core bottlenecks: context governance, trustworthy memory, and dynamic skill routing, together with the orchestration and governance mechanisms that coordinate and constrain them. We further outline a research agenda for harness-level benchmarks that go beyond one-shot task success to measure trajectory quality, memory hygiene, context efficiency, communication fidelity, verification cost, and safe evolution over time. To make the discussion concrete, we develop CheetahClaws: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/cheetahclaws, a Python-native reference harness, and compare it with Claude Code and OpenClaw. Our main claim is that future progress in agentic AI will depend as much on system design as on stronger foundation models.
May 25, 2026

From Facts to Insights: A Persona-Driven Dual Memory Framework and Dataset for Role-Playing Agents

While role-playing agents excel in short-term interactions, long-term conversations overwhelm context windows, motivating external memory frameworks. Current systems typically rely on persona-agnostic summarization, which records facts without persona-specific interpretation, yielding generic responses that compromise persona fidelity. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoleMemo, a dataset featuring four reasoning tasks where the factual fragments must be interpreted through the persona to reach the correct answer. Evaluation on RoleMemo exposes critical limitations of persona-agnostic frameworks. We thus propose DualMem, which decouples memory into two streams: factual cognition and persona-conditioned insight. Trained through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), our framework with a 4B-parameter model outperforms zero-shot persona-agnostic frameworks powered by DeepSeek-V3.2 for sustained persona fidelity. Our resources are available at https://github.com/role2026/rolememo.
May 24, 2026

Towards Multi-Turn Dialog Systems for Industrial Asset Operations and Maintenance

Industrial asset operations and maintenance question answering is inherently multi-turn, iterative, and highly dependent on external tool invocation. However, the conventional plan-execute single-agent architecture exhibits clear limitations in maintaining cross-turn context, and reusing intermediate results. In this paper, we present a multi-turn dialog system designed for industrial scenarios based on a supervisor-specialist multi-agent architecture. To alleviate tool invocation bottlenecks, the system incorporates structured artifact reuse, dynamic replanning, and parallel tool execution. Evaluation results show that our system achieves better response quality compared with the baseline, with planning effectiveness increasing by 54.5% and task completion improving by 37.8%. System profiling further shows that cross-turn artifact reuse effectively reduces redundant tool invocation, decreasing the tool-time share from 47.3% to 26.3% and making turns 2-5 approximately 4.2x faster than the first turn.
May 22, 2026

From Correctness to Preference: A Framework for Personalized Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) has achieved strong progress in tasks with clear success signals. However, many real-world agent applications require user-conditioned behavior: the same query may call for different planning strategies and tool-use decisions across users. This setting raises key challenges: generic rewards cannot capture heterogeneous user preferences, observed behaviors are entangled with conformity effects, and flat memories cannot support personalized skill retrieval. To this end, we propose a unified personalized Agentic RL framework that embeds personalization into training-time optimization. At its core is Personalized Anchor Reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (PARPO), which decouples generic task-quality rewards from personalized preference rewards and uses user-specific anchors to stabilize learning under heterogeneous reward scales. We further introduce a two-stage preference-disentangled reward model and Preference-Aligned Skill Evolution Graph Memory (PSGM) for personalized supervision and preference-aligned skill retrieval. Together, they form a closed loop of preference identification, policy optimization, and structured skill accumulation. Experiments on ETAPP, ETAPP-Hard, and SJAgent show that our framework consistently outperforms strong memory and RL baselines. Code and data are included in the supplementary materials.
May 21, 2026

Short-Term-to-Long-Term Memory Transfer for Knowledge Graphs under Partial Observability

Reinforcement learning under partial observability requires deciding what information to retain, yet most memory-based approaches do not explicitly model short-term-to-long-term transfer of symbolic observations. We study this transfer process in a temporal knowledge-graph memory setting and cast it as a neuro-symbolic value-based decision problem: for each observed triple, the agent chooses whether to keep or drop it before long-term insertion. To handle variable-sized short-term buffers, we use a per-item Q-learning design with shared parameters and a practical temporal-difference update over matched items across consecutive steps. On the RoomKG benchmark at long-term memory capacity 128, learned transfer decisions outperform symbolic and neural baselines, including symbolic baselines with temporal annotations and history-based LSTM/Transformer baselines. Across transfer-policy ablations, a lightweight local short-term-only variant performs best, and step-level behavior shows that the policy keeps navigation- and query-relevant facts while discarding lower-value candidate facts, supporting explicit and interpretable memory decisions under memory constraints.
May 20, 2026

MedExpMem: Adapting Experience Memory for Differential Diagnosis

Experienced physicians develop diagnostic expertise through clinical practice, acquiring not only disease knowledge but also the ability to differentiate confusable conditions. Current medical vision-language models (VLMs) lack this capability -- their parameters encode static knowledge that does not evolve across diagnostic encounters. We propose MedExpMem, an experience memory framework enabling VLM-based diagnostic agents to accumulate differential diagnosis expertise. Unlike retrieval-augmented generation, which retrieves encyclopedic disease descriptions, MedExpMem memorizes discriminative experience derived from the agent's own diagnostic failures and organizes them as pairwise differential notes encoding key discriminators, actionable decision rules and reasoning error patterns. The framework adopts a two-phase construction process mirroring physician learning: initial practice exposes knowledge gaps, and reflective re-diagnosis refines understanding. When encountering new cases, the agent retrieves experience memory to guide differential reasoning. We evaluate MedExpMem on a radiology benchmark spanning 11 subspecialties. Results demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements, maximum 7.0%, across diverse models and scales. Analytical experiments validate experience quality and robustness, demonstrating MedExpMem as a competitive method addresses medical adaptation needs beyond the reach of parameteric learning.
May 19, 2026

Memory-Induced Supra-Competitive Outcomes Between Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents in Optimal Trade Execution

In this paper, we investigate whether deep reinforcement-learning agents interacting in a shared optimal-execution environment can sustain supra-competitive outcomes, in the sense of achieving lower implementation shortfalls than the relevant game-theoretical competitive benchmark. We study a two-agent Almgren-Chriss liquidation game and examine how learned behavior depends on intra-episode environment feedback, the ability to interpret the mid-price and the agent's knoledge of the past. We first use ex-ante schedule-learning agents to remove intra-episode feedback and isolate what can arise when agents commit to complete liquidation trajectories before execution begins. We then allow agents to condition on the evolving state using a variety of DDQN architectures. We find that, when agents are given access to intra-episode history, especially recent prices and own past actions, supra-competitive outcomes become substantially more frequent and more persistent. These findings indicate that supra-competitive behavior in this execution game is driven not by multi-agent learning or by current price observation alone, but by feedback, memory, and state-contingent interaction along the realized execution path.
May 19, 2026

Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning Agent for CAD Generation

Automatic generation of computer-aided design (CAD) models is a core technology for enabling intelligence in advanced manufacturing. Existing generation methods based on large language models (LLMs) often fall short when handling complex CAD models characterized by long operation sequences, diverse operation types, and strong geometric constraints, primarily because reasoning chains break and effective error-correction mechanisms are lacking. To address this problem, this paper proposes a memory-augmented reinforcement learning framework for CAD generation agents. The framework encapsulates the underlying geometric kernel into a structured toolchain callable by the agent and builds a closed-loop mechanism of design intent understanding, global planning, execution, and multi-dimensional verification. It also designs a dual-track memory module consisting of a case library and a skill library, and proposes a dynamic utility retrieval algorithm. By introducing reinforcement learning into retrieval and policy optimization, the agent can effectively avoid retrieval traps in which examples are semantically similar but geometrically infeasible, enabling online self-correction and continual evolution without additional large-scale annotated data. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves both the success rate and geometric consistency on complex CAD model generation tasks.
May 18, 2026

Robo-Cortex: A Self-Evolving Embodied Agent via Dual-Grain Cognitive Memory and Autonomous Knowledge Induction

The ability to navigate and interact with complex environments is central to real-world embodied agents, yet navigation in unseen environments remains challenging due to "experiential amnesia," where existing trajectory-driven or reactive policies fail to synthesize generalizable strategies from past interactions. We propose Robo-Cortex, a self-evolving framework that enables robots to autonomously induce navigation heuristics and refine cognitive strategies through a continuous reflection-adaptation loop. By abstracting success patterns and failure pitfalls into natural-language heuristics, Robo-Cortex enables a transition from passive execution to active strategy evolution. Our core innovation is an Autonomous Knowledge Induction (AKI) mechanism that distills multimodal trajectories into a structured Navigation Heuristic Library for knowledge generalization. The architecture further incorporates a Dual-Grain Cognitive Memory system, comprising a Short-term Reflective Memory (SRM) for real-time local progress analysis, and a Long-term Principle Memory (LPM) that abstracts past trajectories into reusable guiding and cautionary principles. To ensure robust decision-making, we introduce a multimodal Imagine-then-Verify loop, where a world model simulates potential outcomes and a VLM-based evaluator validates action plans. Extensive evaluations on IGNav, AR, and AEQA show that Robo-Cortex consistently outperforms strong baselines in both task success and exploration efficiency, with gains of up to +4.16% SPL over the strongest prior method and up to +15.30% SPL under heuristic transfer to unseen environments. Preliminary real-world robotic experiments further support the effectiveness of Robo-Cortex in physical settings.
May 18, 2026

SPIKE: An Adaptive Dual Controller Framework for Cost-Efficient Long-Horizon Game Agents

Long-horizon multimodal agents in open-world games must stay goal-directed across many low-level interactions under tight token and latency budgets. Existing approaches often trade off costly per-step reasoning against reactive execution that can drift, repeat failures, and recover poorly. Our key idea is to reuse strategic reasoning across locally stable segments and reinvoke it at event boundaries. We present SPIKE, an adaptive dual controller framework for cost-efficient long-horizon game control. Its Strategic Controller performs low-frequency global planning, failure analysis, and recovery, while its Reactive Controller handles fast local execution under a strict token budget. An Event Trigger monitors visual change, task progress, repeated actions, and failure signals to decide when control should stay reactive or escalate to strategic reasoning. Hierarchical Memory separates short-term experience reuse in the State-Action Memory Bank (SA-MB) from structured evidence in the State Action Knowledge Graph (SA-KG), allowing each controller to retrieve the context it needs. This design reuses strategic proposals over multiple reactive steps, supports local override when plans become stale, and reserves expensive reasoning for moments where extra deliberation is useful. On the Lite-100 split of StarDojo, SPIKE improves Lite-100 success rate (SR) by 5.0 percentage points (38.5% relative) over the strongest Lite-100 baseline and Budgeted SR by 9.3 points (75.6% relative) over the strongest budgeted baseline. It also reduces token consumption by 54.9% and latency by 40.8%. Ablations show that event triggering, reactive override, and heterogeneous memory each contribute to success and recovery, supporting selective reasoning rather than reasoning at every step.
May 18, 2026

AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agents

Vision-language model (VLM) agents increasingly rely on memory-augmented reinforcement learning to reuse experience across long-horizon tasks, yet most existing frameworks store memory as text and depend on proprietary teacher models to summarize or refine it. This design is poorly matched to spatial decision making: geometric priors are compressed into lossy language, and sparse interaction is often supervised through delayed textual feedback rather than dense visually grounded signals. We argue that reusable experience for VLM agents should remain visually grounded. Based on this insight, we propose AtlasVA, a teacher-free visual skill memory framework that organizes memory into three complementary layers: spatial heatmaps, visual exemplars, and symbolic text skills. AtlasVA further evolves danger and affinity atlases directly from trajectory statistics and lightweight grid heuristics, and reuses these self-evolving atlases as potential-based shaping rewards for reinforcement learning. This unifies perception, memory, and optimization without external LLM supervision. Experiments on Sokoban, FrozenLake, 3D embodied navigation, and 3D robotic manipulation benchmarks show that AtlasVA consistently outperforms text-centric memory baselines and competitive VLM agents, with especially strong gains on spatially intensive tasks. Homepage: https://wangpan-ustc.github.io/AtlasvaWeb
May 18, 2026

Remembering More, Risking More: Longitudinal Safety Risks in Memory-Equipped LLM Agents

Safety evaluations of memory-equipped LLM agents typically measure within-task safety: whether an agent completes a single scenario safely, often under adversarial conditions such as prompt injection or memory poisoning. In deployment, however, a single agent serves many independent tasks over a long horizon, and memory accumulated during earlier tasks can affect behavior on later, unrelated ones. Studying this regime requires evaluation along the temporal dimension across tasks: not whether an agent is safe at any single memory state, but how its safety profile changes as memory accumulates across many independent interactions. We call this failure mode temporal memory contamination. To isolate memory exposure from stream non-stationarity, we introduce a trigger-probe protocol that evaluates a fixed probe set against read-only memory snapshots at varying prefix lengths, together with a NullMemory counterfactual baseline for identifying memory-induced violations. We apply this protocol across three deployment scenarios spanning records, memos, forms, and email correspondence and eight memory architectures, and additionally on Claw-like AI agents, such as OpenClaw, using the platform's native memory mechanism. Memory-enabled agents consistently exceed the NullMemory baseline, and memory-induced violation rates show a robust upward trend with exposure length on both agent classes. Order-randomization experiments indicate that the effect is driven primarily by accumulated content rather than encounter order. Finally, a structural consequence of the event decomposition is that memory-induced risk is detectable from retrieval state before generation, which we confirm with a high-recall diagnostic monitor. Our results argue for treating memory safety as a longitudinal property that requires temporal evaluation, not a single-state property that can be captured by a snapshot.
May 18, 2026

EXG: Self-Evolving Agents with Experience Graphs

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning and problem solving through multi-step interactions, yet most deployed agents remain behaviorally static, with knowledge acquired during execution rarely translating into systematic improvement over time. In response, a growing line of work on self-evolving agents explores how agents can improve through experience during deployment, but most existing approaches either rely on ad hoc reflection limited to single-task correction or adopt unstructured memory that accumulates fragmented experience with delayed usability. To address this limitation, we introduce EXG, an experience graph framework for self-evolving agents that explicitly organizes accumulated successes and failures into a structured, relational representation. EXG is the first experience graph designed for self-evolving agents, supporting both online, real-time graph growth during execution for immediate cross-task experience reuse, and offline reuse of a consolidated experience graph as an external memory module. This design also enables EXG to serve as a plug-and-play component for existing self-evolving agents, organizing prior experience into a unified experience graph and improving both solution quality and resource efficiency as deployment progresses. Extensive experiments across code generation and reasoning benchmarks show that EXG attains more favorable performance-efficiency trade-offs than reflection- and memory-based baselines in both online and offline evaluations. Our results suggest that structuring experience as a graph provides a principled foundation for scalable and transferable self-evolving agent behavior.
May 17, 2026

MATE: Solving Contextual Markov Decision Processes with Memory of Accumulated Transition Embeddings

We propose MATE, a simple yet effective memory architecture for solving Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), a family of MDPs parameterized by an unobserved context. In CMDPs, an optimal agent can adapt online by maintaining the posterior belief over contexts. MATE replaces this intractable posterior with a sum-aggregated memory, leveraging the posterior's permutation invariance to retain provably sufficient expressiveness. Compared to prior memory architectures, MATE avoids the growing per-step rollout cost of Transformers and the gradient issues commonly associated with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that MATE provides clear computational advantages while achieving performance comparable to standard sequence-model baselines.
May 16, 2026

LASAR: Towards Spatio-temporal Reasoning with Latent Cognitive Map

A fundamental challenge in embodied AI is verifying if agents build internal models of spatial structure or merely learn to mimic task-specific expert trajectories. This is critical as foundational approaches rooted in action-centric tasks (e.g., VLN) and reasoning-centric tasks (e.g., EQA) often share a common limitation: they lack a learning signal that forces them to encode fine-grained spatial relationships (like topology or distance) over long-range, fragmented experiences. To address this, we first propose LASAR, an architecture featuring a dual-memory system designed to maintain both episodic experiences and a semantic cognitive map. We then introduce Spatio-temporal Contextual Representation Learning (ST-CRL), a contrastive objective designed to train this architecture. ST-CRL leverages spatio-temporal cues from cognitive queries generated through annotated spatio-temporal context in simulation to build sample pairs, thereby forming the internal cognitive map from the agent's experiences. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 2%-3.5% gains in both zero-shot generalization on standard VLN-CE and VSI-Bench benchmarks. We also demonstrate that our proposed cognitive map has high self-consistency.
May 16, 2026

SE-GA: Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution for GUI Agents

Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents often struggle with multi-step tasks due to constrained context windows and static policies that fail to adapt to dynamic environments. To address these limitations, this work proposes the Self-Evolving GUI Agent (SE-GA), a novel framework that integrates hierarchical memory structures with an iterative self-improvement mechanism. At the core of our approach is Test-Time Memory Extension (TTME), which facilitates long-term planning by dynamically retrieving episodic, semantic, and experiential memories to provide salient contexts during inference. To ensure continuous learning, we introduce Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution (MASE), which is a training pipeline that adopts the data collected by TTME to stabilize and enhance the agent's foundational policy. Extensive evaluations across both offline and online benchmarks demonstrate SE-GA achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching success rates of 89.0% on ScreenSpot and 75.8% on the challenging AndroidControl-High dataset. Furthermore, significant improvements on the AndroidWorld benchmark highlight the superior generalization to dynamic environments. Open source code: https://github.com/jinshilong-dev/SE-GA
May 16, 2026

Emergence of a Flow-Assisted Casting Strategy for Olfactory Navigation via Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

In dynamic flow fields, various animals exhibit remarkable odor search capabilities despite relying on stochastic detections. Interestingly, there exists an optimal time window for integrating these detections that maximizes search efficiency. To understand the underlying mechanism, we investigate the navigation performance of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in unsteady flows under varying memory lengths and flow conditions. Without any predefined models, the agents develop a flow-assisted casting strategy and adaptively adjust both the geometry of their search trajectories and the concentration threshold for initiating casting to maximize the success rate. The agent's average speed toward the odor source exhibits a non-monotonic dependence on memory length, which can be explained by the "sector-search" model.
May 15, 2026

Visual Agentic Memory: Enabling Online Long Video Understanding via Online Indexing, Hierarchical Memory, and Agentic Retrieval

Long video understanding requires more than large context windows. It also needs a memory mechanism that decides what visual evidence to retain, keeps it searchable over long horizons, and grounds later reasoning in recoverable observations rather than compressed latent state alone. We propose Visual Agentic Memory (VAM), a training-free framework with three components. Online Indexing supports selective evidence retention under streaming constraints. Hierarchical Memory organises retained evidence in a Parallel Representation that aligns temporal context with spatial observations. Agentic Retrieval searches, inspects, and verifies candidate evidence before producing a grounded answer. On OVO-Bench, VAM achieves the highest RT+BT average (68.41) across all reported baselines, improving over end-to-end use of the same underlying MLLM (Gemini 3 Flash, 67.46). On the month-scale split of MM-Lifelong train@month (105.6 hours over 51 days), VAM reaches 17.11%, second only to ReMA with GPT-5 (17.62%). These results suggest that long-horizon video understanding benefits from treating visual memory as an explicit, inspectable, and queryable substrate. Code is available at https://github.com/yiliu-li/Visual-Agentic-Memory.
May 15, 2026

Toward Natural and Companionable Virtual Agents via Cross-Temporal Emotional Modeling

Recent advances in foundation models have enabled conversational agents that aim for sustained companionship rather than mere task completion. Yet most still remain unable to support natural, long-term companion-like interactions, resulting in experiences that feel episodic and inauthentic. We argue that current agents overlooked cross-temporal modeling of agents' social behaviors and internal emotions: generated behaviors rarely influence an agent's emotional state, and emotional states seldom shape subsequent behaviors. We present Cross-Temporal Emotion Modeling (CTEM), a framework that links long-term behavioral history to moment-to-moment emotional expression. CTEM establishes a closed loop where past experiences update an evolving emotional state; this state conditions immediate interactions; and user feedback continually revises both memory and emotional state, enabling reflection and anticipation. We instantiate CTEM as Auri, a companion agent on an instant-messaging platform, and report a 21-day in-the-wild study showing that CTEM shows improvements in perceived naturalness, coherence, and emotional harmony.
May 14, 2026

DrugSAGE:Self-evolving Agent Experience for Efficient State-of-the-Art Drug Discovery

Building state-of-the-art (SOTA) predictive models for drug discovery requires expensive search over tools, architectures, and training strategies. Current LLM-based agents can find SOTA solutions through extensive trial and error, but they do not retain the experience accumulated along the way and therefore pay the full search cost on every new task. We propose \method (Self-evolving Agent Experience), a framework that accumulates and reuses experience across tasks to build SOTA drug discovery models efficiently. \method maintains a cross-task memory of verified skills, statistical evidence about effective strategies, and a record of recurring errors and their fixes. In some cases, \method transfers a working solution directly without test-time search. In 33 molecular property prediction tasks, \method ranks first among nine SOTA agents in a single-task setting. With memory accumulated from 16 smaller tasks, \method achieves an averaged normalized score of 0.935 on 17 held-out tasks in a cross-task evaluation setting and outperforms all baseline agents by 10-30% in a zero-test-time search regime. In summary, our work shows the advantage of cross-task memory for efficient SOTA model development in drug discovery.
May 14, 2026

ASH: Agents that Self-Hone in Long-Horizon Worlds

Long-horizon visuomotor tasks remain a fundamental challenge in AI, as current methods rely on hand-engineered rewards or action-labeled demonstrations, neither of which scales. We introduce ASH, an agentic system that learns a long-horizon policy from unlabeled, noisy internet video, without reward shaping or expert annotation. ASH follows a self-improvement loop; when it gets stuck, ASH learns an Inverse Dynamics Model (IDM) from its own trajectories, and uses its IDM to extract supervision from relevant internet video. ASH uses unsupervised learning to identify key moments from large-scale internet video and retains them as long-term memory - allowing it to tackle long-horizon problems. We evaluate ASH on two complementary environments demanding multi-hour planning: Pokemon Emerald, a turn-based RPG, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, a real-time action-adventure game. In both games, behavioral cloning, retrieval-augmented and zero-shot foundation-model baselines plateau, while ASH sustains progression across our 8-hour evaluation. ASH reaches an average of 11.2/12 milestones in Pokemon Emerald and 9.9/12 in Legend of Zelda, while the strongest baseline gets stuck in both environments at an average of 9.3/12 and 7.8/12 milestones, respectively. We demonstrate that self-improving agents are a scalable recipe for learning in long-horizon worlds.
May 12, 2026

Composition of Memory Experts for Diffusion World Models

World models aim to predict plausible futures consistent with past observations, a capability central to planning and decision-making in reinforcement learning. Yet, existing architectures face a fundamental memory trade-off: transformers preserve local detail but are bottlenecked by quadratic attention, while recurrent and state-space models scale more efficiently but compress history at the cost of fidelity. To overcome this trade-off, we suggest decoupling future-past consistency from any single architecture and instead leveraging a set of specialized experts. We introduce a diffusion-based framework that integrates heterogeneous memory models through a contrastive product-of-experts formulation. Our approach instantiates three complementary roles: a short-term memory expert that captures fine local dynamics, a long-term memory expert that stores episodic history in external diffusion weights via lightweight test-time finetuning, and a spatial long-term memory expert that enforces geometric and spatial coherence. This compositional design avoids mode collapse and scales to long contexts without incurring a quadratic cost. Across simulated and real-world benchmarks, our method improves temporal consistency, recall of past observations, and navigation performance, establishing a novel paradigm for building and operating memory-augmented diffusion world models.
May 12, 2026

Grounding by Remembering: Cross-Scene and In-Scene Memory for 3D Functional Affordances

Functional affordance grounding requires more than recognizing an object: an agent must localize the specific region that supports an interaction, such as the handle to pull or the button to press. This is difficult for training-free vision-language pipelines because actionable regions are often small, visually ambiguous, and repeated across multiple same-category instances in a scene. We propose AFFORDMEM, a framework that grounds 3D functional affordances by remembering geometry at two levels. The first is cross-scene affordance memory: the agent maintains a category-level memory bank of RGB images with affordance regions rendered as overlays, and recalls the most informative examples at query time to guide a frozen VLM toward small operable subregions that text-only prompting consistently misses. The second is in-scene spatial memory: as the agent processes the scene, it organizes candidate instances and their 3D spatial relations into a structured scene graph, enabling the language model to resolve references over distant or currently unobserved candidates such as "the second handle from the top." AFFORDMEM requires no model fine-tuning and no target-scene annotation, using a reusable memory bank built from source scenes. On SceneFun3D, our method improves AP50 over the prior training-free state of the art by 3.23 on Split 0 and 3.7 on Split 1. Ablation studies support complementary benefits: cross-scene affordance memory improves fine-grained localization, while in-scene spatial memory provides the larger gain on spatially qualified queries. The project homepage is available at the project page.
May 11, 2026

RoboMemArena: A Comprehensive and Challenging Robotic Memory Benchmark

Memory is a critical component of robotic intelligence, as robots must rely on past observations and actions to accomplish long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments. However, existing robotic memory benchmarks still lack multimodal annotations for memory formation, provide limited task coverage and structural complexity, and remain restricted to simulation without real-world evaluation. We address this gap with RoboMemArena, a large-scale benchmark of 26 tasks, with average trajectory lengths exceeding 1,000 steps per task and 68.9% of subtasks being memory-dependent. The generation pipeline leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to design and compose subtasks, generates full trajectories through atomic functions, and provides memory-related annotations, including subtask instructions and native keyframe annotations, while paired real-world memory tasks support physical evaluation. We further design PrediMem, a dual-system VLA in which a high-level VLM planner manages a memory bank with recent and keyframe buffers and uses a predictive coding head to improve sensitivity to task dynamics. Extensive experiments on RoboMemArena show that PrediMem outperforms all baselines and provides insights into memory management, model architecture, and scaling laws for complex memory systems.
May 11, 2026

NanoResearch: Co-Evolving Skills, Memory, and Policy for Personalized Research Automation

LLM-powered multi-agent systems can now automate the full research pipeline from ideation to paper writing, but a fundamental question remains: automation for whom? Researchers operate under different resource configurations, hold different methodological preferences, and target different output formats. A system that produces uniform outputs regardless of these differences will systematically under-serve every individual user, making personalization a precondition for research automation to be genuinely usable. However, achieving it requires three capabilities that current systems lack: accumulating reusable procedural knowledge across projects, retaining user-specific experience across sessions, and internalizing implicit preferences that resist explicit formalization. We propose NanoResearch, a multi-agent framework that addresses these gaps through tri-level co-evolution. A skill bank distills recurring operations into compact procedural rules reusable across projects. A memory module maintains user- and project-specific experience that grounds planning decisions in each user's research history. A label-free policy learning converts free-form feedback into persistent parameter updates of the planner, reshaping subsequent coordination. These three layers co-evolve: reliable skills produce richer memory, richer memory informs better planning, and preference internalization continuously realigns the loop to each user. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NanoResearch delivers substantial gains over state-of-the-art AI research systems, and progressively refines itself to produce better research at lower cost over successive cycles.
May 11, 2026

Retrieve-then-Steer: Online Success Memory for Test-Time Adaptation of Generative VLAs

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their closed-loop reliability often degrades under local deployment conditions. Existing evaluations typically treat test episodes as independent zero-shot trials. However, real robots often operate repeatedly in the same or slowly changing environments, where successful executions provide environment-verified evidence of reliable behavior patterns. We study this persistent-deployment setting, asking whether a partially competent frozen VLA can improve its reliability by reusing its successful test-time experience. We propose an online success-memory guided test-time adaptation framework for generative VLAs. During deployment, the robot stores progress-calibrated successful observation-action segments in a long-term memory. At inference, it retrieves state-relevant action chunks, filters inconsistent candidates via trajectory-level consistency, and aggregates them into an elite action prior. To incorporate this prior into action generation, we introduce confidence-adaptive prior guidance, which injects the elite prior into an intermediate state of the flow-matching action sampler and adjusts the guidance strength based on retrieval confidence. This design allows the frozen VLA to exploit environment-specific successful experience while preserving observation-conditioned generative refinement. This retrieve-then-steer mechanism enables lightweight, non-parametric test-time adaptation without requiring parameter updates. Simulation and real-world experiments show improved task success and closed-loop stability, especially in long-horizon and multi-stage tasks.
May 11, 2026

Bridging the Cognitive Gap: A Unified Memory Paradigm for 6G Agentic AI-RAN

As 6G evolves, the radio access network must transcend traditional automation to embrace agentic AI capable of perception, reasoning, and evolution. A fundamental cognitive gap persists in current disaggregated architectures, where interfaces force the physical layer to compress high-dimensional states into low-dimensional metrics, trapping reasoning agents behind a semantic bottleneck. This article envisions a shift from interface-bound to memory-centric architectures. We propose a unified memory paradigm that dissolves the boundaries between sensing and reasoning by mapping biological memory hierarchies onto heterogeneous computing fabrics. Enabled by emerging coherent interconnects, this approach creates a cognitive continuum where microsecond-level reflexes, millisecond-level reasoning, and long-term evolution share state across time scales. By replacing message passing with zero-copy observability, we empower AI agents to bridge the gap between real-time responsiveness and long-horizon context for truly autonomous 6G networks.
May 10, 2026

Portable Agent Memory: A Protocol for Cryptographically-Verified Memory Transfer Across Heterogeneous AI Agents

We present Portable Agent Memory, an open protocol and reference implementation for transferring persistent memory state across heterogeneous AI agents. Modern AI agents accumulate rich context -- episodic events,semantic knowledge, procedural skills, working state, and identity preferences -- but this context remains locked within vendor-specific runtimes. Portable Agent Memory addresses this through: (1) a five-component structured memory model with content-addressable entries linked by a Merkle-DAG provenance graph providing tamper-evidence; (2) capability-based access control enabling selective, scoped disclosure of memory segments; (3) an injection-resistant rehydration protocol that adapts recalled content to heterogeneous target models while mitigating indirect prompt injection; and (4) a JSON-first serialization format with optional CBOR compaction for efficient transport. We provide a Python SDK with 54 passing tests, agent skills for multiple platforms, and demonstrate cross-model memory transfer between GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama architectures. The protocol is open-source under Apache 2.0.