Despite the wide deployment of memory in large-model agents, there is no unified formal account of what a memory is or when it is optimal. This paper takes a first step toward this account.
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
arXiv:2606. 25115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-device language-model agents improve by accumulating experience in retrieved memory rather than by updating weights.
By Beining Wu, Zihao Ding, Jun Huang, Yanxiao Zhao
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.
arXiv:2606. 18746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops a formal account of what generalist agents must store in memory in order to act near-optimally across multiple environments and goals.
By Khurram Yamin, Namrata Deka, Maitreyi Swaroop, Albert Ting, Jeff Schneider, Bryan Wilder
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:2607. 01224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory expertise is a learned skill: knowing what to encode, when to retrieve, and how to organize knowledge--a capacity known in cognitive science as metamemory.
By Shengguang Wu, Hao Zhu, Yuhui Zhang, Xiaohan Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy
arXiv:2602. 06052v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Research in artificial intelligence is shifting from model innovations and benchmark scores towards problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation.
By Wei-Chieh Huang, Weizhi Zhang, Yueqing Liang, Yuanchen Bei, Yankai Chen, Tao Feng, Xinyu Pan, Zhen Tan, Yu Wang, Tianxin Wei, Shanglin Wu, Ruiyao Xu, Liangwei Yang, Rui Yang, Wooseong Yang, Chin-Yuan Yeh, Hanrong Zhang, Haozhen Zhang, Siqi Zhu, Henry Peng Zou, Wanjia Zhao, Song Wang, Wujiang Xu, Zixuan Ke, Zheng Hui, Dawei Li, Yaozu Wu, Langzhou He, Chen Wang, Xiongxiao Xu, Baixiang Huang, Juntao Tan, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Ahmed A. Metwally, Jun Yan, Chen-Yu Lee, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Xiaokai Wei, Ali Payani, Yu Wang, Haitong Ma, Wenya Wang, Chenguang Wang, Yu Zhang, Xin Eric Wang, Yongfeng Zhang, Jiaxuan You, Hanghang Tong, Xiao Luo, Xue Liu, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Julian McAuley, James Zou, Jiawei Han, Philip S. Yu, Kai Shu
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.
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
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:2607. 20972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents ship with one kind of memory: documents.
By Swapnanil Saha