LLM agents that persist across sessions accumulate stored memories whose validity varies enormously by content type, yet existing memory architectures treat all memories as equally persistent and systematically contaminate retrieved context with outdated facts. We show that per-memory, type-conditioned temporal decay, a property of western scrub jay episodic memory, can be operationalized as an auto-classified coefficient $π_i$ in an external LLM-agent memory store, yielding ScrubJay-MEM: each memory is encoded as a jointly-bound What--Where--When tuple with an estimated perishability $π_i$ and utility horizon $τ_i$, retrieved by query-adaptive scoring, and revised retroactively at $O(1)$ LLM calls per update.
arXiv:2606. 26511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives agents access to accumulated knowledge, but has no model of time.
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."
arXiv:2609.25054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a long-horizon LLM agent, the memory question is not what was once recorded but what \emph{currently holds}. Most designs answer it only indirectly...
arXiv:2609.16073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) serves as the primary memory architecture for long-horizon autonomous agents. However, treating shared memory as...
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.
arXiv:2607. 10441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context engineering decides what information a model carries forward, and current designs meter it in tokens: compressing the past into a bounded recurrent state, keeping a key-value entry for every token, or imposing a fixed budget through a window or eviction rule.
arXiv:2609. 04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache.
arXiv:2606. 29178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When does retention matter for memory-augmented LLM agents?
Fortunate Recall (FR) introduces an ontology-driven policy layer that categorizes personal facts into over ten behavioral types and applies tailored lifecycle rules—such as differential decay, supersession, and event-time validity—to manage memory persistence in large language models. The FR-Bank implementation, independent of underlying infrastructure, achieves a 76.9% pass rate on the new LifecycleBench benchmark and improves LongMemEval-S performance, while significantly reducing confabulation rates compared to prior systems. Ablation studies show that the generic lifecycle metadata drives correctness, whereas the behavioral ontology enhances calibration and reduces downstream hallucinations.
arXiv:2605.12978v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from past experience benefits from two complementary forms of memory: episodic traces -- raw trajectories of what happened -- and consolid...
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.
Mnemon is a memory agent that stores conversations as raw, dated records and uses a fast System 1 decision model (Jev) to quickly judge the relevance of records, while a slow System 2 LLM plans searches and composes answers. The agent consolidates records into topic timelines and value histories in the background, enabling efficient retrieval without rewriting conversations into structured formats. Experiments show Mnemon achieving high scores on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S with low context length and cost, and Jev outperforming LLMs in evidence separation and speed.