A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains.
arXiv:2609. 04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache.
By Chao Yao, Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Junhong Qian, Chenle Chen, Shaoqiang Lu, Chen Wu, Lei He
arXiv:2608. 10502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent memory lets language-model agents reuse information across sessions, but it also makes errors durable: a poisoned, stale, or misattributed record can alter reasoning, tool use, answers, and subsequent memory writes.
By Caili Yu, Yiqi Wang, Jiaqi Zhang, Yiqun Duan, Mingkai Zheng, Zhangkai Wu, Kaize Shi, Taotao Cai
arXiv:2608. 12476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim.
By Guodong Xu
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.
By Shweta Mishra, Shashank Mishra
This paper introduces a deletion interface for a pretrained language model, measuring how effectively deleted records are removed from the model’s memory. By retrofitting a support‑vector memory gate into the global attention layers of a frozen Gemma 3, the authors show that deletions can be performed without altering weights and that the resulting state is close to a reference state that never stored the record. Experiments on 4B‑parameter models demonstrate low perplexity impact and strong evidence that deleted content is hard to recover, while larger or smaller models fail to achieve the same guarantees.
By Vishwajith Ramesh