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.

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• llms
• agents
• benchmarks