Memory Management for LLM Agents

LLM: Large Language Model

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110 papers51 papers in the last four weeks, up 538% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Oct 14, 2026

TreeFlex: Agents Navigating Their Own Search Trees

A ReAct-style agent accumulates observations, intermediate results, and failed attempts in a single context. As this context grows, stale and off-path information consumes its limited capacity and obscures relevant evidence, making focused reasoning increasingly difficult. We introduce TreeFlex, a framework in which the agent's own policy decides where to search. The agent records each intermediate state, with a short summary, as a node in a search tree maintained by the harness. The policy is a single language model that acts in two roles. In the Reflection role, it has a global view of the tree through these summaries and picks a node to resume, together with an instruction. In the Execution role, the harness restores the path that led to that node, and the model carries out the instruction with the usual task tools until it saves a new node or proposes a solution, which Reflection then approves or sends back to another node. Through these choices, the policy decides whether to deepen the current line, branch from or revisit an earlier state, verify a proposal, or stop, without a fixed traversal order or a score for each node. We train navigation, task actions, checkpointing, and proposal review jointly with a tree-aware adaptation of GRPO, using task-level outcome rewards augmented by process rewards. After small-scale RL of a 4B model, with the same active-context limit for all methods, TreeFlex reaches 48.8% accuracy on a challenging deep-research benchmark, versus 41.5% for flat ReAct and 42.8% for FoldAgent, and its Pass@8 is about ten points higher than either. On SWE-bench Verified, with all three systems trained with RL from the same 9B model, TreeFlex resolves 54.9% of tasks, versus 43.3% for FoldAgent and 45.2% for its step-wise variant.

Dongzhuo Li, Fangzhou Cheng, Weiwei Li +8

Meta AI

Memory Management for LLM Agents LLM Agents LLM Agent Planning Software Engineering Agents LLM Agent Memory RL for LLM Agents

Oct 14, 2026

MemCode: Discrete Semantic Representations for Long-Term Agent Memory

Long-term memory remains a fundamental bottleneck for large language model (LLM) agents across sessions. Existing systems typically adopt a write-then-retrieve paradigm, storing context-dependent dialogue fragments and retrieving them via nearest-neighbor search in a continuous embedding space. This design yields unstable access units and systematically misses logically related but lexically distant evidence. We propose MemCode, a long-term agent memory framework that couples retrieval-oriented writing with discrete associative retrieval. MemCode rewrites dialogue into self-contained atomic memory units (AMUs), maps AMUs into a learnable codebook with isomorphic semantic quantization (ISQ), and uses codebook co-occurrence topology as a retrieval path complementary to vector search. For long-term memory stores, MemCode separates online atomic writes from asynchronous offline consolidation. On LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with GPT-4o-mini and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 backbones, MemCode achieves the best overall accuracy while keeping per-dialogue memory construction within roughly 40~~130 seconds, making it 3~~21 times faster than LightMem and over an order of magnitude faster than A-MEM and MemoryOS.

Xin Li, Liang Hu, Duoqian Miao +2

Tongji University · WorldMind

LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management Associative Memory

Oct 1, 2026

Mem++: Non-Destructive Memory for Long-Term Organizational LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents now take part in organizational work, where many authors record decisions across documents over months. Because a revised decision arrives as a new document rather than an edit, answering a question requires knowing which version held at a given time. However, most memory systems compress the record at write time. By distilling each document into facts, notes or graph edges, these methods fix what can be answered before any question is asked. To address this, we propose Mem++, a non-destructive memory framework shifting from write-time distillation to read-time selection. Mem++ stores every document whole with its date and author, and it calls no generative model at write time. At read time, it retrieves only documents dated up to the time a question asks about and fuses lexical and semantic rankings. Unlike systems that overwrite older versions, Mem++ keeps them and leaves the choice to the answering model. Evaluations on the organizational benchmark OrgMemBench demonstrate that Mem++ surpasses the strongest memory system baseline by 8.0 to 13.1 points across two answering models. With gpt-4.1-mini, it also achieves the best overall score, 2.6 points above RAG. In addition, Mem++ achieves the best average LLM-judge score on LoCoMo and ranks second on LongMemEval-S, behind only its entity-graph variant. Code for benchmark evaluation is available at https://github.com/AIDAChip-Inc/mem-plus-plus.

Ahmad Yehia, Aly O. Abdelkareem, Islam Ahmed +4

The University of Texas at Austin · AIDAChip Inc.

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Question Answering Agent Memory Management Temporal QA Memory Management for LLM Agents

Oct 1, 2026

Understanding Issues, Causes and Solutions in Open-Source LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

With the advancement of LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS), an increasing number of opensource projects are adopting multi-agent architectures as the foundation of their core functionality. Although research and practice on MAS have attracted considerable attention, limited studies have explored the challenges faced by practitioners of open-source LLM-based MAS, the causes of these challenges, and potential solutions. To address this gap,we conducted an empirical study to understand the issues that practitioners encounter when developing and using open-source LLM-based MAS, the possible causes of these issues, and potential solutions. We collected 22,848 closed issues from 21 open-source LLM-basedMASand applied a mixed automated and manual filtering approach to reduce the dataset to 944 issues related to LLM-based MAS.We then analyzed these issues to understand the frequent issues encountered by practitioners, their underlying causes, and potential solutions. Our study results show that (1) Orchestration & Execution Issue is the most common issue faced by practitioners, (2) Workflow Problem, Tool Integration Problem, and Memory Problem are identified as the most frequent causes of the issues, and (3) Optimize Workflow is the predominant solution to the issues. Based on the study results, we derive empirically grounded implications for practitioners and researchers aimed at improving orchestration, tool integration, and memory mechanisms in LLM-based MAS.

Asad Ur Rehman, Syed Mohammad Kashif, Ruiyin Li +3

School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China · School of Computer Science & Hubei Provincial Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Learning, Central China Normal University, China · M3S Empirical Software Engineering Research Unit, University of Oulu, Finland

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents LLM Tool Use

Sep 28, 2026

Mnemon: Raw Records, Fast Judgments, Slow Thoughts

Long-term memory lets an LLM assistant use a history it can no longer reread, and most memory systems build it by rewriting conversations into facts, graphs or typed memories at write time. We argue that the work of memory divides, as thinking does, into two systems. Most of it is fast System 1 work: many small, independent yes/no judgments about records, such as whether a record is needed or no longer current, which a decision model makes by the dozen in a third of a second. Only a little is slow System 2 work: writing a few search queries, naming what the reply needs and composing the answer, which an LLM does well but slowly. We present Mnemon, a memory agent built on this division. It keeps conversations as raw, dated records; an LLM (System 2) plans searches over them, a decision model, Jev (System 1), judges what the searches return, and rules with explicit budgets turn the judgments into a small View for an unchanged answering model. A background pass consolidates each record once into topic timelines, value histories and standing instructions linked to the records, so that questions about a whole conversation reach evidence their own searches miss. Because nothing is decided about a record when it is written, the same agent can read any store that returns dated records. With gpt-4.1-mini answering, as in a public re-evaluation of 14 systems, Mnemon scores 91.7% on LoCoMo, the highest among them, and 83.8% on LongMemEval-S, from under 4k tokens of context per question, with the lowest effective cost index on LoCoMo. With a reasoning model answering, it reaches 92.2% on LoCoMo and 94.4% on LongMemEval-S, the latter on par with the best published results. From 100K to 10M tokens of history on BEAM, its cost per question grows by a factor of 1.11. On the same records, Jev separates gold evidence better than two LLMs and is 3-11 times faster.

Guangren Wang

Persistent Memory for Language Models Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Memory Management for LLM Agents

Sep 28, 2026

Remember by Asking: Retrieval-Induced Memory Evolution for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for language agents to maintain coherent and effective behavior over extended, multi-session interactions. Existing memory systems mainly use retrieval at read time, while write-time memory formation still relies on direct extraction or compression. However, when future information needs are unknown, compressing an entire interaction in one pass can overlook locally important details that may matter later. To this end, we introduce RIME, a retrieval-induced memory framework that shifts memory construction from monolithic compression toward evidence-centered integration. RIME uses generic self-questions to retrieve focused dialogue evidence and grounds memory formation in both the retrieved evidence and relevant historical memories, which are jointly reconciled into an evolving memory bank with temporal and provenance information. At inference time, compressed memory serves as the primary rather than the sole source of evidence: when it cannot support an answer, RIME retrieves relevant source dialogue together with its local context to recover information omitted during memory formation, without resorting to full-history processing. Extensive experiments on LoCoMo with Qwen3-235B-A22B and GPT-5.6 Sol show that RIME consistently achieves the best performance across all three quality metrics among the compared methods, while requiring substantially fewer query-time LLM tokens.

Wanqi Zhou, Jiawei Lu, Yang Wang +4

Chang’an University

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

Sep 26, 2026

EMIR $^2$ : Evolution-Aware Memory with Intent-Guided Multi-Round Retrieval

Long-term memory enables large language model (LLM) agents to leverage historical interactions for future tasks. However, existing memory systems struggle to utilize continuously evolving historical information, as they often rely on static memory representations and single-round retrieval strategies, failing to track factual changes or integrate distributed evidence across long-term interactions. To address these challenges, we propose EMIR

^{2}

, an Evolution-Aware Memory framework with Intent-Guided Multi-Round Retrieval, enabling LLM agents to maintain evolving historical knowledge and adaptively retrieve relevant evidence. Specifically, EMIR

^{2}

constructs a State-Evolving Memory Graph (SEMG) that represents long-term memory as evolving knowledge states supported by temporal event trajectories and evidential associations. By maintaining semantic states through evidence-based updates, SEMG preserves historical evolution and enables evidence tracing under complex and conflicting scenarios. Building upon this, we introduce an intent-guided multi-round retrieval mechanism that iteratively identifies missing evidence and expands retrieval based on accumulated information. Experiments on LoCoMo and MemConflict demonstrate that EMIR

^{2}

improves long-term memory utilization, dynamic and static conflict handling, and complex retrieval performance, achieving relative improvements of more than 12% in certain categories. These results highlight the effectiveness of jointly modeling memory evolution and adaptive evidence acquisition for long-term agent interactions.

Jinlan Liu, Hongliang Sun, Yong Wang +4

Department of Computer Science, Weihai & Qingdao Research Institute Harbin Institute of Technology Weihai, China

Memory Management for LLM Agents LLM Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Graph-Based Agent Memory

Sep 25, 2026

HasMem: Hard-Origin Adaptively Softened Memory for Long-Term LLM Agents

Text-based memory and context compression support reuse of past interactions. Resizing continuous memory changes the input to a frozen LLM, coupling capacity allocation with readout. We propose Hard-Origin Adaptively Softened Memory (HasMem). Frozen hard-prompt embeddings provide a verifiable initial state. A controller adjusts memory widths, a Writer re-encodes resized entries, and Reader and Global provide readout adaptation and cross-turn state. On all

535

questions in a reconstruction probe derived from the Multi-Session Chat (MSC) development split, the main configuration achieves lexical F1 of

95.3

(

+4.4

percentage points) at

93.6\%

of the hard reference's framed memory positions. With approximately matched per-question target body budgets, six configurations at mean per-entry retention around

0.83

--

0.91

exceed rule-based re-encoding by

8.0

--

23.6

exact-match (EM) percentage points. With fixed model parameters and rule target width ratio

0.75

, Global's EM gain passes a user-level exact paired test with Bonferroni correction over eight comparisons. On all

500

LongMemEval-S questions, local lexical F1 rises from the hard reference's

3.4

to

8.9

, and answer negative log-likelihood (NLL) falls from

12.257

to

5.274

. F1 gains accompany lower EM on both evaluations.

Zihong He, Junxiao Shen, Chen Liang +1

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · University of Bristol · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Memory Management for LLM Agents Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 24, 2026

ADM-Planner: LLM-Guided Long-Horizon Planning for Mobile Manipulators with Attention-Enhanced Dynamic Memory

Large language models can decompose mobile-manipulation goals into long action sequences, but the resulting plans remain reliable only while their world context is current. A fixed scene description becomes stale when objects are discovered, moved, or completed while retaining every observation instead produces a growing history with redundant and conflicting state. To resolve this tension, we present an LLM-guided planning framework ADM-Planner with attention-enhanced dynamic memory (ADM). Persistent workspace knowledge is separated from object-centric state, asynchronous observations and action outcomes update that state, and a bounded retriever exposes only the entries that can affect the next decision. The LLM replans when an update invalidates the remaining plan. Across 1,500 task-simulator episodes, the proposed ADM achieved 100% full-task success in the 14-container noisy dynamic setting, compared with 62% for static memory and 97% for unfiltered dynamic memory, while reducing the context-size proxy by 95.8% relative to the latter. In a six-episode live GPT-5 Mini planner, both dynamic memory variants completed every mission, while ADM reduced provider-reported input tokens by 14.4% and mean planner calls from 7.0 to 6.0. A separate 60-trial PyBullet study retained 100% success for ADM, compared with 50% for static memory. Finally, the mobile manipulator with ADM-Planner completed various missions in indoor and outdoor physical experiments while incorporating targets revealed after execution began. The results show that selective state maintenance with ADM, rather than prompt history alone, is a practical basis for long-horizon planning in changing environments. Project page: https://xjp99v5.github.io/ADM-Planner

Jiaping Xiao, Pingyuan Ji, Mir Feroskhan

School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Mobile Manipulation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents State Tracking+3

Sep 21, 2026

Jev-Mem: System-One-Controlled Agentic Memory for Efficient AI Agents

Agentic memory is becoming essential for long-horizon AI agents, yet many existing systems rely on autoregressive LLMs to control how memories are organized, retrieved, and used, placing expensive generation on the critical path of memory operations. We introduce \method, a new agentic memory architecture inspired by System-One/System-Two cognition. System One captures fast, lightweight decision-making, whereas System Two performs slower, deliberative reasoning. Jev-Mem brings this division of labor to agentic memory through a dedicated System-One control plane, a structured multi-relational memory plane, and a System-Two reasoning plane. The System-One controller governs memory typing and relational organization during construction, and dynamically performs query routing, retrieval-budget allocation, graph traversal, candidate scoring, and adaptive stopping during retrieval. System Two is invoked only for complex reasoning and answer synthesis. This design improves both memory effectiveness and system efficiency: on LoCoMo Jev-Mem achieves an overall LLM-as-a-Judge score of 0.777, an 11.0% relative improvement over the strongest baseline, while reducing memory construction time to 158,s, a 6.6

\times

speedup over the fastest competing memory system, and lowering average query latency to 0.93,s, a 36.7% reduction.

Dongming Jiang, Yi Li, Bingzhe Li

Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas

LLM Agent Memory Graph-Based Agent Memory Long-Horizon LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Memory Management for LLM Agents

Sep 4, 2026

Compact-Memory LLM Agents via Online Max-Member Clustering and Atom-Aware Packing

Many long-horizon LLM deployments face tight prompt budgets: latency, cost, and context limits make full-context prompting impractical as interaction length grows. The key question is then not raw recall alone, but which memory design gives the best quality--token trade-off in the compact-memory regime. We present RSM-full, an online clustered-memory pipeline designed for a strong quality--token Pareto point. RSM-full combines two design choices: a cosine-gated max-member merge write rule and an atom-aware grouped context packer. On AMA-Bench, our primary compact-memory benchmark, it reaches

83%

of Full-Context quality at

32%

of the token cost at a

4

k budget; under four-seed averaging it beats the closest streaming-clustered baseline (Online K-Means) by

+3.5

--

6.0

,pp (

p{<}.001

) across the whole

{\sim}2.6

k--

{\sim}5

k regime. Three-seed ablations show most of this gain comes from the merge rule (

+5.7

,pp over Online K-Means and matched-

τ

DP-means) and the grouped packer (

+5.0

,pp over flat concatenation). The pattern reproduces on RealMem, an independent long-horizon persona-memory benchmark: RSM-full improves on Budget-RAG (

+0.69

,pp,

p{=}.006

), is on par with BM25-RAG (paired

Δ{=}{+}0.27

,pp,

p{=}.47

; we do not claim BM25 equivalence in the equivalence-test sense), and significantly outperforms Streaming-Proto (

+2.97

,pp) and the closest reproduced 2025 agentic-memory baseline A-MEM (

+1.65

,pp,

p{<}.001

). Across benchmarks the message is consistent: under tight budgets, compact-memory performance is driven mainly by how streaming memories are merged and how retrieved content is assembled. Overall, RSM-full is most useful when answeroughly

2k

--

5k

prompt tokens, where itdefines a strong compact-memory Pareto point; higher-token baselines remain stronger outside this regime.

Jiahe Geng, Jinpeng Wang, Kun Yuan

LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents Context Compaction for LLM Agents Clustering Memory Agent Benchmarks

Sep 4, 2026

KVMem: Virtualizing Million-Token Agent Workspaces on a Consumer GPU

Modern LLM agents operate in persistent workspaces whose accumulated history can exceed both GPU KV capacity and the model's native context window. Existing systems typically compact older context into summaries or retrieve it later as text, either losing fine-grained execution evidence or repeatedly prefilling content that the model has already processed. We present KVMem, a KV-context virtualization system that preserves overflowed workspace history as paged KV state across GPU memory, host memory, and NVMe. KVMem uses lightweight, model-native attention-space indexes to select relevant historical blocks and materializes a query-dependent execution view bounded by the model's native context window. Extensive evaluations on long-context agent benchmarks spanning histories up to one million tokens, including LongMemEval, MemoryAgentBench, and AgentLongBench, show that KVMem generally achieves higher task utility and greater inference efficiency than compaction-based approaches, the de facto standard for handling context overflow. In the DeepSWE long-context test with Qwen3.8-27B, KVMem improves task success from 43.8% with compaction-only context management to 48.4%. In our local-deployment evaluation, KVMem runs Qwen3.6/3.8-27B NVFP4 with MTP on an off-the-shelf laptop equipped with a 24,GB RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, virtualizing agent workspaces of up to 1M tokens-four times the model's native 256K-token context window. In a single-session setting, KVMem generates

\sim

50 tokens/s, providing interactive responsiveness for local agent execution. More broadly, by decoupling addressable workspace size from the LLM's native context window, KVMem provides a practical path toward long-running agents whose workspaces can grow beyond that window.

Di Chai, Leye Wang, Zeshen Su +2

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics · Peking University · Northwestern Polytechnical University +1

Memory Management for LLM Agents LLM Context Management Agent Memory Management KV-Cache Offloading Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Inference Efficiency

Sep 3, 2026

EdgeMem: LLM-Free Agent Memory Construction and Retrieval via Evidence-Preserving Multi-Anchor Hypergraph

Agent memory allows LLM agents to use earlier interactions when answering new queries. Existing methods often compress interaction histories into summaries or other LLM-generated representations. Repeated generation adds cost and can discard answer-bearing details before the system knows what a future query will require. We propose EdgeMem, an agent-memory method built around a simple principle: preserve original interaction turns and organize them through complementary content, temporal, and episodic cues. EdgeMem realizes this principle with a multi-anchor hypergraph constructed by lightweight local processing. Retrieval directly returns source evidence and reserves LLM use for final answer generation, combining structured access to multi-session histories with faithful retention of the original conversation. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S show strong retrieval and memory-grounded question answering; on LoCoMo, EdgeMem achieves the highest strict-judge score among seven reproduced systems under a shared prompt (61.01 versus 58.70), while construction and retrieval require no generative-LLM calls. Overall, EdgeMem shows that preserving and organizing source evidence provides an effective and efficient foundation for agent memory without generative memory management.

Zeyang Cui, Jiannong Cao, Zhiyuan Wen +3

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · JIUTIAN Research, China Mobile Beijing, China

Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents Conversational Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Graph-Based Agent Memory

Sep 2, 2026

SkillGLoW: Procedural-Family Skill Consolidation for Self-Improving Agents on Long-Horizon Task Streams

LLM agents increasingly self-improve by writing and reusing textual skills, kept either as one global document or as a flat pool of per-task entries, though most of the evidence comes from domains with structurally similar tasks. On long-horizon workloads where each task demands a different solution, the two forms fail in opposite ways: the document collapses into generic discipline, while the pool inflates and its entries stay bound to the instance that wrote them. We argue the missing unit of reuse is the solving procedure shared by a cluster of related tasks, and build SkillGLoW (Global-Local Weave) around it: the local skills a task writes from its own execution are aggregated into procedural families and compressed into de-instantiated global priors, while the instance detail they hold is regenerated per task rather than stored; a commit gate admits a prior only when real execution shows it does not degrade the deployed library. Across four benchmarks (mathematical reasoning, terminal automation, software repair, and embodied control) and three models, the priors gain 17.2 points (hard) over the no-skill baseline on average, with positive gains in all 12 continual-improvement runs, and 18.0 with local regeneration, while the library holds one prior per procedural family, 3.6x more compact than the per-task pool. Under the same protocol GLoW leads a published single-document optimizer on 15 of 21 cells. Unmodified, the library lifts success on unseen ALFWorld tasks from 73.9% to 83.9%, evidence that what transfers is procedure rather than task memory.

Ao Yan, Xin Zhang, Jiawei Du +1

National University of Singapore, Singapore · Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Singapore

Memory Management for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Transfer Learning

Aug 21, 2026

Weighted Memory Tree: Remembering What Matters for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated the ability to solve multi-step tasks requiring planning, tool use, and external information access, yet growing execution histories increase inference cost and expose reasoning to outdated, irrelevant, or misleading information, potentially degrading reasoning quality. Existing memory approaches organize or compress execution histories but provide limited mechanisms for deciding which memories remain active. We introduce the, a hierarchical memory system that organizes execution into tasks, subtasks, and actions while assigning each memory a dynamic retention score. Event-based updates and selection-based decay revise these scores, allowing WMT to preserve useful information, fold completed trajectories, suppress low-utility content, and retain access to folded context. We evaluate WMT on GAIA-Text using Qwen3-8B, Gemma 4 E4B, and Llama-3.1-8B, with ablations and memory-poisoning experiments. Relative to linear memory, WMT improves accuracy by an average of 9.97 percentage points while reducing prompt-token usage by 32.8%. Memory-poisoning experiments show that WMT limits the persistence and propagation of unreliable information. Our results suggest that effective long-horizon agent memory depends less on storing more information than on deciding which information should remain active.

Quang Dao, Purvi Kathalkar, Kenneth Eaton

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology · Georgia Institute of Technology · Georgia Tech Research Institute

LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Aug 13, 2026

LycheeMemory V2: Efficient Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents via Semantic Segment-Level Consolidation

Long-horizon LLM agents must preserve information from past interactions to support future tasks. Existing memory systems typically rely on eager consolidation, invoking LLMs after each interaction to extract, summarize, or update memories. This design makes memory construction increasingly costly as conversations grow. Coarse summarization can reduce construction cost but risks discarding fine-grained contextual evidence, whereas larger retrieval contexts or multi-hop LLM reasoning shift the overhead to query time. We present LycheeMemory V2, an efficient long-term memory framework that replaces turn-level consolidation with semantic segment-level consolidation. Instead of consolidating every interaction, LycheeMemory batches multiple exchanges into segments and encodes each finalized segment into context-independent typed memory records. Segment-level batching lowers LLM encoding frequency, while semantic boundary detection helps preserve coherent event-level and temporal evidence compared with fixed-window batching. The resulting records are organized with lightweight structured indexes for query-planned evidence retrieval. Experiments using GPT-4.1-Mini show that LycheeMemory achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 89.22% on LoCoMo and 92.20% on LongMemEval-S. Compared with A-Mem, it reduces construction tokens by 86.0% on LoCoMo and 75.9% on LongMemEval-S without increasing query-time token usage. More broadly, our results suggest that the accuracy--cost trade-off of long-term agent memory depends not only on what information is retained, but also on the granularity at which it is consolidated.

Dongfang Li, Zixuan Liu, Junmai Wang +6

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen

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

Aug 4, 2026

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

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

Yuxin Liao, Le Wu, Min Hou +3

Hefei University of Technology

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

Jul 31, 2026

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

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

Yilin Xiao, Zhehan Zhu, Yujing Zhang +8

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

Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Context QA LLM Agent Memory Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management Graph-Based Agent Memory+1

Jul 31, 2026

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

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

Jinghan Xu, Yiyong Xiao, Wanru Shao +2

Agent Memory Poisoning Tool Access Control for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Persistent Memory for Language Models LLM Agent Safety Agent Memory Governance+1

Jul 31, 2026

TransMem: Transforming Hidden States into Memory for Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long interaction histories, where effective reasoning requires identifying and exploiting task-relevant evidence distributed across past observations and actions. However, useful information encoded in previously computed representations is often underutilized during subsequent generation. We propose TransMem, a lightweight inference-time parametric memory module that transforms sparse historical hidden states from a frozen LLM backbone into reusable memory representations. TransMem uses a lightweight gating network to dynamically apply the latent intervention to the current hidden states, without repeatedly encoding the preceding context. To learn transferable memory utilization rather than task-specific knowledge, we introduce evidence-conditioned self-distillation. A memory-augmented student processes the full context and matches the predictive distribution of an evidence-only teacher that shares the same frozen backbone. Experiments on LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate consistent improvements across different model architectures and scales. TransMem yields gains of 11.58--29.25

F_1

on LoCoMo and 10.20--13.03

F_1

on HotpotQA, while improving the average MemoryAgentBench accuracy from 29.54% to 40.00%. These results establish sparse historical hidden states as an effective and efficient memory substrate for long-context LLM agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haodong-Lei-Ray/TransMem.

Haodong Lei, Junming Liu, Yirong Chen +4

Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China

Memory-Augmented Language Models LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Memory Management for LLM Agents

Jul 17, 2026

LazyMem: Retrieve Broadly, Construct Selectively for Efficient Long-Term Agent Memory

Long-term memory enables LLM agents to leverage past interactions, but dialogue histories quickly exceed the context window, forcing agents to retrieve relevant subsets at query time. Because useful evidence is sparse and scattered across verbose conversations, retrieval faces a fundamental tension: broadening recall improves coverage but floods downstream reasoning with noise, while compressing memories at write time eases retrieval but irreversibly discards details that future queries may need. We introduce LazyMem, which resolves this tension by deferring all memory construction to query time. Given a retrieved candidate pool, a lightweight model processes it in overlapping parallel windows, selectively retaining and compressing only query-relevant content. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning, using a reward that jointly encourages the identification of relevant messages and the generation of compressions that are faithful to the source and useful for answering the query. On LongMemEval, LazyMem-4B achieves an LLM-judge accuracy of 0.85, outperforming the strongest non-oracle baseline while using only 213 answer-context memory tokens, 21.0 times fewer than the baseline. It further generalizes to LoCoMo without target-domain training and reduces mean latency relative to the prior query-time baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/allacnobug/LazyMem.

Jing Yu, Yibo Zhao, Jiaming Zhang +1

School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University

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

Jul 15, 2026

Memory as a Controlled Process: Learned Adaptive Memory Management for LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks. Yet nearly all existing approaches, from graph-structured memories to reflective insight stores, access memory through fixed, hand-designed heuristics. We argue that this static view of memory is a core bottleneck for agentic learning because optimal memory behavior is fundamentally context-dependent. The early stages of the tasks, benefit from minimal retrieval because memory is sparse; recurring goal types benefit from plan reuse rather than generic nearest-neighbor lookup; stuck agents benefit from re-retrieval with alternative queries; and across long task streams, the memory store itself must be consolidated and pruned to remain useful. We present Memory as a Controlled Process (MemCon), a framework that models memory operations as a Markov Decision Process and learns an online policy that adaptively decides when, what, and how much to retrieve, when to inject a distilled plan, and when to consolidate or forget. MemCon is backend-agnostic: it wraps any existing memory implementation, learns from task-by-task binary feedback with no pretraining and no additional LLM calls, and uses a lightweight tabular contextual bandit with UCB exploration that converges within tens of tasks. Across 6 benchmarks, 3 agent frameworks, and 3 LLM backbones, MemCon consistently outperforms multiple memory baselines by up to 15.2 points in task success while reducing token consumption by 5--20%.

Eric Hanchen Jiang, Zhi Zhang, Yuchen Wu +11

University of California Los Angeles · University of Washington · Northwestern University

Persistent Memory for Language Models Memory Management for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jul 9, 2026

Heavy-Tailed Memory Traces in Long-Horizon Language Agents

Long-horizon language agents are becoming increasingly important for tasks that require persistent interaction, planning, and reasoning over extended trajectories. External memory plays a central role in these agents by preserving past states, transitions, and experiences beyond the limited context window. Existing memory systems, however, are typically evaluated mainly by task success and token cost, with much less attention to how memory usage is distributed across stored information. We show that repeated retrieval can produce heavy-tailed memory usage, where a small set of states is accessed frequently while many others are rarely retrieved and more prone to prediction errors. We study this phenomenon through a systematic tail audit across retrieval policies and graph structures. We find that memory concentration is reproducible but strongly policy-dependent, ranging from log-normal-compatible patterns under random walks to truncated-power-law-compatible heavy tails under semantic LLM policies. Motivated by these findings, we propose Core-Tail Memory Controller (CTMC), a rank-based memory controller that allocates prompt budget with a single exponent

τ

while preserving summarized information from the tail. Across Synthetic Graph World and ALFWorld, CTMC substantially reduces memory usage while preserving performance, and on LongMemEval it reduces prompt tokens by 24.48% while maintaining aggregate accuracy. These results show that heavy-tailed memory usage is both a measurable property of long-horizon agent memory and a practical signal for improving memory efficiency.

Xinyuan Song, Zekun Cai

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA · The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan · LocationMind, Tokyo, Japan

Memory Management for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Jun 28, 2026

Selective Memory Retention for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

When does retention matter for memory-augmented LLM agents? We study this with TraceRetain, a lightweight framework for bounded external memory in frozen LLM agents that scores entries by interpretable features (success, age, access frequency, redundancy, specificity, similarity, downstream utility) and evicts the lowest-scoring ones at capacity. On clean ALFWorld with gpt-5-mini, external memory robustly improves over no memory across two seeds, but differences among bounded retention policies fall within Wilson 95% CIs: clean ALFWorld at T=100 to T=200 does not naturally exhibit the memory pollution retention is designed to address. Under a controlled noisy-write stress (75% synthetic distractors), unbounded memory and FIFO-K50 degrade on Precision@5 (20.2% to 12.4% and 15.8% to 3.8%) while TraceRetain-CEM is essentially unchanged (16.9% to 16.6%) and preserves 97/100 task success. The mechanism: unbounded memory has the highest mean similarity (0.87) but lowest precision, indicating failed distractors close to the query in embedding space. Held-out in-distribution evaluation shows memory-augmented policies solving 47 to 49 of 50 tasks vs. 39/50 for no memory. Bounded retention buys memory and step efficiency on saturated clean benchmarks at no task-success cost, and only differentiates from cache heuristics when streams contain noise.

Pranath Reddy

Independent Researcher, Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Horizon LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Memory Management for LLM Agents

Jun 26, 2026

SWE-MeM: Learning Adaptive Memory Management for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

Long-horizon software engineering agents often need to manage lengthy and noisy interaction histories under limited context budgets. Existing memory management methods typically rely on static compression workflows or impose rigid constraints on compression timing and granularity. Moreover, these approaches fail to jointly optimize memory management and issue resolution capabilities to improve performance while reducing token usage. We present SWE-MeM, a training framework for proactive and on-demand memory management in software engineering agents. SWE-MeM provides a flexible memory tool that lets agents decide when, what, and how to compress based on trajectory state, task progress, and remaining context budget. We train agents with synthesized proactive memory-management trajectories and Memory-aware GRPO, which jointly optimizes memory management and issue resolution through memory-aware trajectory splitting and step-level credit assignment. On SWE-Bench Verified, SWE-MeM achieves 43.4% and 60.2% resolve rate with 4B and 30B models, respectively, outperforming existing memory management baselines in both performance and efficiency.

Shuzheng Gao, Wenhao Zeng, Zhaojian Yu +5

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China · Tsinghua University, China +1

Software Engineering Agents Memory Management for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management RL for LLM Agents

Jun 23, 2026

Forget to Improve: On-Device LLM-Agent Continual Learning via Budget-Curated Memory

On-device language-model agents improve by accumulating experience in retrieved memory rather than by updating weights. This memory is hard-bounded and exposed: it consumes RAM and energy, reaches peers through a thin uplink, and becomes an attack surface because it is writable by what the agent reads. Existing systems each cover one part of this problem: agentic memories grow without a budget, on-device methods keep entries by success alone, and poisoning is studied mainly as an attack rather than as a memory-governance problem. We propose \sys{}, a single net-value-per-byte score that governs an agent's experience-memory lifecycle. The main idea is to let the budget act as the curator: each entry is scored as value minus harm, per byte, so one ruler decides what to keep, share, and trust. \sys{} makes three decisions: (1) KEEP evicts low-value bytes under the RAM and energy budget; (2) SHARE sends an insight only when its value exceeds its uplink cost; and (3) TRUST gates a peer entry by provenance. On language-model-agent task-drift benchmarks and a real heterogeneous Jetson testbed with two robot-arm nodes and a hub, \sys{} reduces memory by

2.7\times

and uplink by

2.4\times

, drives injection success from 0.75 to zero, and raises accuracy on cases corrupted by poison or stale memory. Curating by net value reduces footprint, energy, uplink, and injection success together without reducing accuracy. In this setting, forgetting by net value improves the agent rather than weakening it.

Beining Wu, Zihao Ding, Jun Huang +1

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007, USA · Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Memory Agent Memory Poisoning Agent Memory Management Memory Management for LLM Agents Agent Memory Governance

Jun 19, 2026

AdaMem: Learning What to Remember with Adaptive Memory Policies for Personalized Agents

Long-term memory systems allow LLM agents to preserve information beyond a single context window, but most systems focus on storing and retrieving facts after extraction, leaving the write decision under-specified. What deserves memory can depend on the user's current task, topic, activity, or interaction partner, while uniform extraction applies one notion of importance across these different situations. We formulate this challenge as preference-conditioned write control and introduce AdaMem, which uses adaptive natural-language Memory Policies to personalize what an agent writes to memory. Each policy represents the user's memory preference for a particular interaction context, is updated from periodic feedback, and controls subsequent memory writing. We evaluate this loop in AdaMem-Bench, which assigns different memory preferences to six concurrent interaction personas across five ten-week stories. Across two extraction models and two feedback modes, AdaMem improves average QA accuracy over Mem0 from 80.0% to 84.35% while reducing persistent memory by 9.27%. Our analyses show that explicit feedback helps models learn better memory policies, but current models still struggle to translate those policies into reliably selective writing behavior. AdaMem thus demonstrates the promise of adaptive write control while exposing policy execution as a central limitation of current memory agents. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/galaxyChen/AdaMem

Xingyu Chen, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu +1

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tencent · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Tencent

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Agent Memory Management Personal AI Agents Memory Management for LLM Agents

Jun 16, 2026

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback -- objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts -- by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma -- outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance -- and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture -- rules, evidence, and skills -- connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

Yanwei Cui, Xing Zhang, Yulong Zhang +4

AWS Generative AI Innovation Center · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · BingX Group Limited.

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Non-Stationary RL Reinforcement Learning LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents RL for LLM Agents

Jun 11, 2026

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

Minjae Kim, Jinheon Baek, Soyeong Jeong +1

Korea University · KAIST

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

Jun 9, 2026

Infini Memory: Maintainable Topic Documents for Long-Term LLM Agent Memory

Long-term LLM agents need persistent memory that can track changing facts and provide relevant evidence across sessions. Existing memory systems often store observations as isolated records, summaries, or indexed fragments, which makes evidence aggregation, fact revision, and memory maintenance difficult. We propose Infini Memory, a maintainable text-based persistent memory architecture that treats agent memory as topic-structured documents. Each topic document serves as a semantic unit for collecting related evidence, preserving metadata, and revising facts over time. New observations are first staged in a buffer and periodically consolidated into coherent textual contexts. At inference time, an agentic retrieval procedure lets the LLM read memory through iterative tool calls rather than a single retrieval step. On MemoryAgentBench, Infini Memory achieves 64.7% overall score. Ablations show that topic-structured maintenance and iterative evidence inspection improve complementary aspects of long-term memory use.

Suozhao Ji, Baodong Wu, Zehao Wang +8

1Infinigence AI · 2Tsinghua University · 3Shanghai Jiaotong University

Agentic RAG Persistent Memory for Language Models Memory Consolidation Agent Memory Management LLM Agent Memory Memory Management for LLM Agents+1