MemoryTax: The Bitter Lesson of Agent Memory
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2606. 29914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent memory systems are increasingly evaluated against RAG and full-context baselines, but reported gains often mix changes in the memory method with changes in the language model, embedding model, or retrieval pipeline, making it unclear what is actually being measured.
arXiv:2610.18052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory has become a core component of large language model (LLM) agents. As agents accumulate personal information over long-term use, users...
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.
Mnemon is a memory agent that stores conversations as raw, dated records and uses a fast System 1 decision model (Jev) to quickly judge the relevance of records, while a slow System 2 LLM plans searches and composes answers. The agent consolidates records into topic timelines and value histories in the background, enabling efficient retrieval without rewriting conversations into structured formats. Experiments show Mnemon achieving high scores on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S with low context length and cost, and Jev outperforming LLMs in evidence separation and speed.
The paper introduces MERIT, a benchmark that evaluates the marginal benefit of long‑term memory for tool‑using large language model agents while explicitly accounting for cost. MERIT provides episodic tool‑use tasks across three domains, verifies dependence on earlier‑episode facts, and measures memory operations in tokens and dollars. Experiments on GPT‑4.1‑mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 5 show that memory can significantly improve task success, but its utility varies widely across models and memory implementations, and full replay is rarely cost‑effective.
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.