arXiv Machine Learning

Adaptive Memory Index Evolution for Agents

Adaptive Memory Index Evolution for Agents (AMIE) is a lightweight plug‑in layer that evolves per‑memory access state from deployment retrievals without altering stored content or retraining the host memory system. It distills a semantic teacher’s keep/suppress judgments into a retrieval‑conditioned policy and accumulates selective actions into bounded state that reweights subsequent host retrievals. Across five retrieval‑based hosts and three benchmarks, trained AMIE improves downstream F1 or accuracy in all 15 comparisons (0.70–3.37 percentage points) and improves retrieval in all 10 comparisons, demonstrating that persistent memory access can be adapted independently of memory content.

arXiv AI
1d 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
Oct 23

Learning What to Remember: Resource-Efficient Self-Improvement for Lifelong Agents

The paper introduces TokenWorth, a lightweight framework that learns the value of past experiences for self-improving agents operating under strict resource constraints. By using sparse execution feedback, TokenWorth guides both retrieval and memory management without updating the core model, enabling agents to adaptively reuse only the most beneficial experiences. Experiments on LifelongAgentBench show that TokenWorth outperforms existing lifelong-memory methods in task success while minimizing output tokens within the given budgets.

By Guannan Lai, Zi-Yang Bai, Jun-Peng Jiang, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv Computation and Language
1d 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
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
Oct 2

What Should an Agent Remember? Disentangling Retention from Retrieval in Bounded-Memory Evaluation

The paper introduces a streaming-recall benchmark that separates retention and selection decisions for persistent agents. It shows that query‑aware selection boosts recall by 15.5 points when access is fixed, while mixed comparisons inflate gains due to changes in history access. The study finds that under bounded retention, failures stem from eviction rather than ranking errors, and that dense retrieval can outperform lexical retrieval on natural text.

By Juli Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

AEL: Evolving Agent Harness in Open-Ended Environments

The paper introduces Agent Evolving Learning (AEL), a two‑timescale framework that dynamically evolves an LLM agent’s memory‑retrieval harness in open‑ended environments. A fast Thompson‑Sampling bandit selects among retrieval policies each episode, while a slower LLM reflection diagnoses performance drops and injects new policies when the current set plateaus. AEL outperforms ten self‑improving and non‑LLM baselines on a sequential portfolio benchmark, boosting Sharpe ratio by 27% and achieving significant accuracy gains on a support‑ticket routing stream.

By Wujiang Xu, Jiaojiao Han, Minghao Guo, Kai Mei, Xi Zhu, Han Zhang, Dimitris N. Metaxas