arXiv AI
Oct 21

More Memory, Worse Agents: Error Reproduction and Anti-Persistence in LLM Agents

The paper investigates how large language model (LLM) agents can improve performance by storing and reusing experience in external memory. It identifies a problem called error reproduction, where mistakes in stored abstractions propagate through cycles of abstraction, execution, and re-abstraction, leading to persistent errors. To mitigate this, the authors propose Anti-Persistence, a memory design that retains raw trajectories and outcomes but reconstructs task-specific guidance on demand, discarding it after use. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that Anti-Persistence yields higher held‑out success rates and lower LLM‑call costs compared to other memory designs, supporting the idea of separating experience accumulation from abstraction persistence.

By Ruhan Wang, Kishan Panaganti, Dongruo Zhou
arXiv AI
Oct 7

AMBER: Training Long-Horizon Web Agents through Append-Only Memory

The paper introduces AMBER, an append‑only memory framework for language‑model agents that interact over long horizons. AMBER lets agents jointly learn to reason, act, and write free‑form memory, guaranteeing retention by construction and enabling end‑to‑end reinforcement learning without extensive curated data. Experiments on WebArena Lite show AMBER outperforms overwrite‑based memory by 4.09 percentage points in average success and improves task completion rates in repeated runs.

By Chinmay Savadikar, Zhaoyu Zhang, Mingyu Zhao, Shuang Xie, Han Li, Tianfu Wu, Lingyun Wang