arXiv AI

When Stored Evidence Stops Being Usable: Scale-Conditioned Evaluation of Agent Memory

The paper introduces a scale‑conditioned evaluation protocol for agent memory that measures how usable evidence degrades as irrelevant sessions accumulate. It logs memory trajectories and reports four diagnostics—budget‑compliant reliability, tail memory‑call burden, failure‑regime decomposition, and the usable‑scale boundary. Experiments on LongMemEval and LoCoMo show that reliability loss varies across memory interfaces and agents, highlighting that scalable‑memory claims must be conditioned on agent, interface, scale range, and interaction budget.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

Persistent Memory in Multi-Agent LLM Inference: What It Costs, What It Buys, and When You Can Tell

The paper evaluates the impact of adding a persistent memory tier to a multi‑agent large language model inference system. While decomposing long‑context inference across agents reduces the peak KV cache usage from about 35 MiB to 14.3 MiB per query, the persistent tier adds only a modest 0.368 MiB to the cache and shows no measurable accuracy improvement across eight dataset pairs. The authors argue that the lack of benefit is structural, as single‑question benchmarks do not provide informative recall opportunities, and they outline conditions and detection procedures for agent‑memory ablations.

By Hochan Son, Kyungdoe Han, Jaehan Koh, Xiaowu Dai, Wenlu Xu, Guang Cheng
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
arXiv AI
Oct 5

DyadMem: A Long-Term Memory Benchmark of How Agents Work with Users

DyadMem introduces a new benchmark for evaluating how long‑term agents remember user‑specific relational information, called User‑conditioned Relational Agent Memory (URAM). The dataset contains 3,065 episodes, 50,961 sessions, and 61,210 QA pairs, with detailed annotations for memory capture, update, and recall across multi‑session trajectories. Experiments on 20 models show strong performance in a gold‑memory setting but a significant drop in full‑pipeline QA, highlighting gaps in current LLM memory capabilities.

By Yifei Tao, Xinyu Zhong, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Fanyi Wang, Tengda Guo, Wentao Qiu, Ying Wang, Liujian Tang
arXiv AI
Sep 16

LSREP: A Longitudinal State-Replay Protocol for Evaluating Conversational Memory, with ICE v2 as an Audited Local-First Architecture

The paper introduces LSREP, a Longitudinal State‑Replay Evaluation Protocol designed to assess how conversational memory evolves over time, incorporating ordered replay, lifecycle schedules, repeated probes, evolving reference answers, and mechanism‑fidelity checks. It applies LSREP to ICE v2, a local‑first memory middleware, and reports that on three ordinary‑density datasets ICE v2 achieves near‑zero mean quality difference from vector‑RAG while using fewer fragments but slightly more prompt tokens, yet fails catastrophically on a dense dataset. In a public diagnostic, ICE v2 underperforms pure vector‑RAG on LongMemEval, revealing significant multi‑session and temporal failures and a quality‑cost trade‑off rather than superior efficiency.

By Deepesh Sonar
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

EvalMem: An Operation-Level Diagnostic Framework for Long-Term Memory Systems

arXiv:2609.22231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon interactions with LLM-based assistants require memory systems that preserve and update user states, preferences, and interaction histories...

By Zeyu Liu, Jian Zhong, Rongduo Han, Ziyang Wu, Shunye Tang, Chenghao He, Yaxuan Yang, Yihang Qiu, Ailing Wang, Xiao Liang, Guohuan Xie, Xiaokang Xue, Gongchen Li, Haining Zhang, Wei Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

The Memory Trust Gap: Capability-Dependent Failures in Persistent-Memory Agents

The paper investigates how persistent memory in AI agents can lead to over‑trust in stale facts, creating a "Memory Trust Gap" that worsens as model capability increases. Using a benchmark with Benefit and Safety suites across Qwen3 models of varying sizes, the authors show that larger models are more prone to harmful over‑trust, especially when metadata is absent or misleading. They also demonstrate that mitigation strategies such as exposing metadata or pre‑resolving conflicts improve accuracy, but the effectiveness depends on model size and dataset.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

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.

By Ashwin Gerard Colaco, Nada Lahjouji