arXiv AI By Xinyuan Song, Zekun Cai

Heavy-Tailed Memory Traces in Long-Horizon Language Agents

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The paper investigates how long-horizon language agents use external memory, noting that memory tends to concentrate on a small core while rare states form a long tail where prediction errors accumulate. Through a tail audit, the authors find that random-walk policies produce log-normal retrieval artifacts, whereas semantic LLM policies generate truncated power-law core–tail traces. They introduce the Core–Tail World Model (CTWM), a rank-based memory controller that allocates prompt budget using a single exponent while summarizing the tail, achieving token savings and reduced tail prediction error across several benchmarks.

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