arXiv AI

Memory Is Communication: The Frontier Between Remembering and Signaling

The paper investigates how a bounded agent should allocate its limited memory and communication resources when making decisions. It defines the remembering–signaling frontier as the set of memory and message rate pairs that achieve a given performance threshold for a fixed task and decision rule. The authors hypothesize that when history can reduce task loss more, the agent will need less peer communication, and preliminary referential game experiments support this idea.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Just-in-Time Memory: Learning to Curate Task-Adaptive Memory for LLM Agents

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
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv:2606. 16285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution.

By Jiangze Yan, Yi Shen, Wenjing Zhang, Jieyun Huang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Ning Wang, Kai Wang, Shiguo Lian
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Learning What Not to Forget: Long-Horizon Agent Memory from a Few Kilobytes of Learning

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 Computation and Language
Sep 21

MemoryArena: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Interdependent Multi-Session Agentic Tasks

MemoryArena is a new evaluation gym that benchmarks agent memory in interdependent multi‑session tasks. Unlike prior benchmarks that test memorization or single‑session action in isolation, MemoryArena requires agents to acquire memory while interacting with the environment and then use that memory to guide future decisions across a range of tasks such as web navigation, planning, information search, and formal reasoning. The benchmark reveals that agents excelling on existing long‑context memory tests perform poorly here, highlighting a gap in current memory evaluation methods.

By Zexue He, Yu Wang, Churan Zhi, Yuanzhe Hu, Tzu-Ping Chen, Lang Yin, Ze Chen, Tong Arthur Wu, Siru Ouyang, Zihan Wang, Jiaxin Pei, Julian McAuley, Yejin Choi, Alex Pentland
arXiv AI
Jun 18

What Must Generalist Agents Remember?

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