arXiv Computation and Language

Smarter by the Moment: Environment-Driven Dynamic Policies for Continual LLM Improvement

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 Computation and Language
2d ago

Harness the Memory: A Holistic Evaluation of Memory Substrates in Memory Agents

The paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of 11 memory substrates for long‑horizon LLM agents, using a unified set of 26 performance and efficiency metrics across three backbone models and four benchmark suites. It finds that no single substrate consistently outperforms others; retrieval‑heavy substrates aid long‑context factual QA but can impair sequential decision‑making, and scalability can shift performance trade‑offs. The study demonstrates that selecting a memory substrate tailored to the operating regime yields better results than any fixed choice, offering empirical guidance for designing efficient, reliable, and regime‑aware long‑term memory systems.

By Wei-Chieh Huang, Weizhi Zhang, Yuchen Wu, Yankai Chen, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Wooseong Yang, Yiwei Yang, Henry Peng Zou, Hanrong Zhang, Ying Nian Wu, Haolun Wu, Kai-Wei Chang, Philip S. Yu, Xue Liu, Aylin Caliskan
arXiv AI
Oct 21

M-Plan: Comprehensive Planning For LLM Agents with Memory Arrangement

M-Plan is a closed‑loop multi‑agent system that combines long‑term and short‑term memory to improve large language model agents on long‑horizon, multi‑turn tasks. It uses task‑specific milestones and local hints to generate global‑local guidance, forming short‑term memory during execution, and then optimizes and stores relevant information in long‑term memory for future use. Experiments on ALFWorld, Webshop, and PDDL show that M‑Plan outperforms baseline methods in both accuracy and efficiency.

By Ziyang Liu, Jiakang Yuan, Jiayuan Fan, Tao Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Learning to Remember: End-to-End Training of Memory Agents for Long-Context Reasoning

The paper introduces the Unified Memory Agent (UMA), a system that builds a query‑agnostic external memory from a data stream and reuses it across multiple question‑answering sessions. UMA employs a single policy to manage a structured Memory Bank via CRUD operations and uses Task‑Stratified GRPO to supervise memory maintenance based on QA trajectory rewards. The authors also present Ledger‑QA, a benchmark for long‑horizon state tracking, and demonstrate that UMA outperforms other methods on test‑time learning and accurate‑retrieval tasks, with UMA‑Specialist further improving performance after task adaptation.

By Kehao Zhang, Shangtong Gui, Sheng Yang, Wei Chen, Yang Feng
arXiv AI
2d ago

Route to Remember: Adaptive Memory Selection for LLM Agents

The paper introduces OPSD, a method that uses on‑policy self‑distillation to train a context‑free student model from a teacher conditioned on user memory, combined with a verify‑then‑regenerate router that directs queries to either weight or text memory. OPSD enables weight memory to compete with or surpass traditional text‑based memory systems on the HaluMem benchmark, reducing token usage per query. The study also explores how different training recipes influence weight memory performance and offers guidance for integrating it with retrieval in persistent, multi‑session agent deployments.

By Zeyu Fang, Jun Yin, Yongsheng Mei, Xu Han, Chaitali Joshi, Zhongkai Sun, Jie Hao, Bin Guo, Chengyuan Ma, Benjamin Z. Yao, Chenlei Guo
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