arXiv Machine Learning

What to Keep, What to Forget: A Rate--Distortion View of Memory Compaction in LLMs and Agents

arXiv:2607. 08032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models, and the agents built on them, spend an ever-growing share of their compute and memory on remembering: caching attention keys and values, carrying long prompts, maintaining recurrent state, and storing what happened in previous turns and sessions.

arXiv AI
Jul 16

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

arXiv:2607. 13591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks.

By Eric Hanchen Jiang, Zhi Zhang, Yuchen Wu, Levina Li, Dong Liu, Xiao Liang, Rui Sun, Yubei Li, Edward Sun, Haozheng Luo, Zhaolu Kang, Aylin Caliskan, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Learning What Not to Forget: Long-Horizon Agent Memory from a Few Kilobytes of Learning

The paper introduces LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a lightweight, CPU‑only, language‑model‑free scorer that learns which parts of an agent’s interaction history are task‑critical and preserves them verbatim. In experiments, LRE matches or surpasses baseline eviction policies on accuracy‑cost trade‑offs, recovers 93% of full‑history accuracy, reduces worst‑case prompt size by 52%, and outperforms dense and token‑pruning encoders in conversational memory while being 295–1569× smaller. The method also achieves superior budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading and can be trained annotation‑free, recovering 95% of supervised scorer performance.

By Nusrat Jahan Lia, Aritra Mazumder
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Just-in-Time Memory: Learning to Curate Task-Adaptive Memory for LLM Agents

The paper introduces Just-in-Time Memory (JitMem), a system that defers memory curation until a task is read, allowing a curator to synthesize task‑specific memory payloads based on the current query. Unlike traditional write‑time curation, JitMem retains raw trajectories and trains the curator using immediate task success, avoiding long‑horizon credit‑assignment issues. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and τ²‑bench show JitMem consistently outperforms both no‑memory agents and existing write‑time memory methods, with improvements of up to 16.3 absolute success‑rate points. whyItMatters":"By curating memory at read time, JitMem enables more effective, task‑adaptive recall that directly improves agent performance across diverse benchmarks."

By Yefan Zhou, Yang Li, Zeyu Leo Liu, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty
arXiv AI
Sep 10

When Does Memory Help? A Cost-Aware Evaluation of Long-Term Memory in Tool-Using LLM Agents

The paper introduces MERIT, a benchmark that evaluates the marginal benefit of long‑term memory for tool‑using large language model agents while explicitly accounting for cost. MERIT provides episodic tool‑use tasks across three domains, verifies dependence on earlier‑episode facts, and measures memory operations in tokens and dollars. Experiments on GPT‑4.1‑mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 5 show that memory can significantly improve task success, but its utility varies widely across models and memory implementations, and full replay is rarely cost‑effective.

By Shweta Mishra, Shashank Mishra