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Oct 16

Forgetting is Not Always Bad: A Neuro-Inspired Memory Repair Mechanism for Poisoned LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are highly vulnerable to memory-poisoning attacks. Existing defenses primarily rely on external modules for either static memory isolation or continuous online auditing, resulting in low memory efficiency and high computational overhead. To address these limitations, inspired by neuroscientific mechanisms that weak reactivation can destabilize memories and induce decay in the absence of reinforcement, we propose an agent-intrinsic training-free memory repair framework, DREAM (Dynamic Reactivation for Engram Attenuation in Memory), that enables selective functional forgetting of poisoned memories. Specifically, DREAM implements a three-stage pipeline: perturbation-induced implicit reactivation to reveal the structural fragility of malicious memories, adaptive anomaly diagnosis based on multi-dimensional activation patterns to detect topological anomalies, and a dynamic memory repair module that selectively suppresses harmful memories while reinforcing benign ones. Extensive experiments across diverse attackers and real-world tasks demonstrate that DREAM reduces attack success rates by over 95\% against backdoor poisoning while preserving strong benign utility. DREAM also achieves competitive robustness against injection attacks. In terms of runtime and token consumption, DREAM achieves up to a 2.13times speedup and a 37.7\% reduction in token consumption compared with A-MemGuard. Furthermore, DREAM also achieves a task success rate of 92.96\% on poisoned multi-agent systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 8

EXPEREPAIR: Dual-Memory Enhanced LLM-based Repository-Level Program Repair

Automatically repairing software issues remains a fundamental challenge at the intersection of software engineering and AI. Although recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for repository-level repair tasks, current methodologies exhibit two notable limitations: (1) they often address issues in isolation, neglecting to incorporate insights from previously resolved issues, and (2) they rely on static and rigid prompting strategies, which constrain their ability to generalize across diverse and evolving issue scenarios. Inspired by the dual memory systems of human cognition, where episodic and semantic memories work synergistically to support human reasoning and decision-making, we propose ExpeRepair, a novel LLM-based approach that continuously learns from historical repair experiences through dual-channel knowledge accumulation. ExpeRepair organizes historical repair experiences into two complementary memories: an episodic memory that stores concrete repair demonstrations, and a semantic memory that encodes abstract reflective insights. At inference time, ExpeRepair activates both memory systems by retrieving relevant demonstrations from episodic memory and recalling high-level repair insights from semantic memory. It further enhances adaptability through dynamic prompt composition, synergistically integrating both memory types to replace static prompts with context-aware, experience-driven prompts. Experiments on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark demonstrate that ExpeRepair achieves a pass@1 score of 49.3% with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, outperforming all state-of-the-art open-source methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

MEMPROBE: Probing Long-Term Agent Memory via Hidden User-State Recovery

Long-term memory promises LLM agents that grow more capable across sessions, maintaining an accurate, evolving understanding of the user that interaction forms. In practice, however, this memory is evaluated mostly through downstream behavior, such as later answers, personalization quality, or task success, which tests that understanding only indirectly and leaves the memory artifact itself largely unaudited. We argue that long-term memory should instead be evaluated as an auditable post-interaction artifact: after ordinary assistance, what structured user state can be reconstructed from the memory the agent leaves behind? We instantiate this view in MEMPROBE, a benchmark in which a memory-equipped agent assists simulated users, each carrying a hidden, taxonomy-anchored user-state bank, across a trajectory of leak-controlled tasks, after which that bank is reconstructed from the agent's resulting memory under both full-store and top-k access. Built on synthetic ground truth for efficient, scalable measurement, MEMPROBE spans 50 simulated users with 31 hidden dimensions each (1,550 recovery targets) and tests 5 representative memory systems. Testing state-of-the-art memory agents, we find that successful assistance and recoverable memory behave as distinct capabilities. Task completion nearly saturates, even for a memoryless baseline, while category-balanced recovery stays moderate (about 0.6) and drops further under top-k retrieval. MEMPROBE is the first benchmark to study memory recovery directly, reconstructing the user state a system retains and scoring it against ground truth. We see recovery as a concrete objective for future memory agents to optimize, and MEMPROBE as a step toward an environment where agents are trained to remember their users, growing more faithful the longer they know them.

MemCut: Every Secret Leaves a Trail in the Long-Term Memory of LLM Agents

Long-term memory has become a crucial component of large language model (LLM) agents, with most research focusing on retrieving relevant information accurately and efficiently. However, a dependable memory system must also forget sensitive user data upon request. To evaluate this capability, we introduce MemCut, a systematic benchmark for user-requested forgetting. Its 456 hand-designed secrets in long-horizon conversations have fully annotated evidence trails to test recovery after deletion, including from messages that never state the secrets directly. We propose two recovery metrics. Native recovery measures reader success through the system's retrieval, whereas residual recovery measures the same reader's success when directly given surviving objects traced to annotated disclosures or evidence. We establish three reference deletion baselines to test how far existing retrievers and write models support forgetting across five memory designs and four LLMs. Disclosure removal reduces native recovery far more than residual recovery. LLM-guided deletion of ten additional turns from twenty retrieval candidates leaves 39-76% residual recovery. Subset sweeps (144 facts, three systems, two models) show that widening the pool at a fixed budget reduces residual recovery more than deleting all original candidates. These sweeps identify candidate coverage as a bottleneck in the reference baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 14

Dual Memory Networks: A Versatile Adaptation Approach for Vision-Language Models

With the emergence of pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, how to adapt them to various downstream classification tasks has garnered significant attention in recent research. The adaptation strategies can be typically categorized into three paradigms: zero-shot adaptation, few-shot adaptation, and the recently-proposed training-free few-shot adaptation. Most existing approaches are tailored for a specific setting and can only cater to one or two of these paradigms. In this paper, we introduce a versatile adaptation approach that can effectively work under all three settings. Specifically, we propose the dual memory networks that comprise dynamic and static memory components. The static memory caches training data knowledge, enabling training-free few-shot adaptation, while the dynamic memory preserves historical test features online during the testing process, allowing for the exploration of additional data insights beyond the training set. This novel capability enhances model performance in the few-shot setting and enables model usability in the absence of training data. The two memory networks employ the same flexible memory interactive strategy, which can operate in a training-free mode and can be further enhanced by incorporating learnable projection layers. Our approach is tested across 11 datasets under the three task settings. Remarkably, in the zero-shot scenario, it outperforms existing methods by over 3\% and even shows superior results against methods utilizing external training data. Additionally, our method exhibits robust performance against natural distribution shifts. Codes are available at https://github.com/YBZh/DMN.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

IRepair: An Intent-Aware Approach to Repair Data-Driven Errors in Large Language Models

Not a day goes by without hearing about the impressive feats of large language models (LLMs), and equally, not a day passes without hearing about their challenges. LLMs are notoriously vulnerable to biases in their dataset, leading to issues such as toxicity. While domain-adaptive training has been employed to mitigate these issues, these techniques often address all model parameters indiscriminately during the repair process, resulting in poor repair quality and reduced model versatility. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic slicing-based intent-aware LLM repair strategy, IRepair. This approach selectively targets the most error-prone sections of the model for repair. Specifically, we propose dynamically slicing the model's most sensitive layers that require immediate attention, concentrating repair efforts on those areas. This method enables more effective repairs with potentially less impact on the model's overall performance by altering a smaller portion of the model. We evaluated our technique on three models from the GPT2 and GPT-Neo families, with parameters ranging from 800M to 1.6B, in a toxicity mitigation setup. Our results show that IRepair repairs errors 43.6% more effectively while causing 46% less disruption to general performance compared to the closest baseline, direct preference optimization. Our empirical analysis also reveals that errors are more concentrated in a smaller section of the model, with the top 20% of layers exhibiting 773% more error density than the remaining 80\%. This highlights the need for selective repair. Additionally, we demonstrate that a dynamic selection approach is essential for addressing errors dispersed throughout the model, ensuring a robust and efficient repair.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

Teaching Video Generators to Remember: Eliciting Dynamic Memory for Out-of-Sight State Evolution

Video world models should maintain evolving states when evidence is unobserved, yet current generators often freeze hidden states upon interruption. This is not simply a capacity problem: pretrained video diffusion transformers already possess KV-cache mechanisms capable of non-local retrieval, but they are rarely trained to use them as dynamic memory. We introduce ReMind, a framework eliciting dynamic memory behavior via memory-oriented data, event-aware training, and cache adaptation. Organized around a taxonomy of 100+ dynamic events, we build a camera-annotated training mixture combining VLM-filtered real videos, generated hard dynamics, synthetic camera loops, and memory-interruption augmentations. Each clip is converted into a frame graph with protected anchors, degraded intervals, and explicit temporal gaps. A node-structured curriculum, including node-drop, noisy memory, frontier continuation, and reference-cache training, forces the model to retrieve relevant past states across interruptions rather than relying solely on local continuity. PM-RoPE, an elegant camera-phase RoPE extension, unlocks spatiotemporal retrieval at a single-attention cost while preserving pretrained pathways. ReMind achieves the best overall scores on STEVO-Bench and recovery tasks. Furthermore, general image-to-video evaluations confirm this curriculum avoids catastrophic forgetting. We will open-source our code, data, and models.

  • 8 authors
·
May 24

MemOps: Benchmarking Lifecycle Memory Operations in Long-Horizon Conversations

Long-term memory has become a foundational capability for LLM-based agents that accompany users across extended, multi-session interactions. Existing benchmarks, however, evaluate such memory almost exclusively through downstream question answering, scoring only the correctness of a final answer. This black-box formulation conflates the heterogeneous causes of memory failure, such as missing the introduction of a relevant fact, binding an operation to the wrong target, or relying on stale values after a correction. As a result, it can credit correct answers despite their reliance on inconsistent or unsafe memory states. In this paper, we argue that, in dynamic long-horizon interactions, memory is not a static collection of facts but a lifecycle of explicit operations, including remembering, forgetting, updating, reflecting, and their compositions. We introduce MemOps, a benchmark that reformulates conversational memory as a sequence of lifecycle operations and represents each memory event with a structured trace specifying its trigger, target, scope, state transition, and supporting evidence. A controllable generation pipeline embeds these operations into long, task-oriented conversations and produces gold operation traces together with six categories of operation-level probes, evaluated under both adjacent-evidence and long-context settings. Across long-context, retrieval-based, parametric and managed-memory systems, MemOps disentangles failure modes that final-answer accuracy alone conceals, revealing that current systems remain far from uniformly reliable. For instance, session-level retrieval outperforms turn-level retrieval, and long-context models remain notably weak at reconstructing ordered memory-state trajectories. These results move long-term memory evaluation from final-answer scoring toward interpretable, operation-level diagnosis.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 13

Erase-then-Delta Attention: Decoupling Erase and Write Addresses in Delta-Rule Linear Attention

Delta-rule linear attention improves recurrent memory updates by correcting what is already stored at the current write address before writing new content. However, the active correction is still anchored to that same write address. As a result, stale information stored at a different address cannot be actively removed before new content is written elsewhere. We propose Erase-then-Delta Attention (EDA), a memory update rule that decouples where to erase from where to write. The key insight is that recurrent memory models should not only correct the current write, but also selectively suppress outdated memory at an independently chosen address. Concretely, our method first applies a targeted erase step along a learned erase direction, and then performs the standard delta-style corrective write along the current write direction. This preserves the corrective behavior of delta-rule updates while expanding their memory-management capacity. Language-model pretraining experiments across dense 2.5B and MoE 25B-A2.8B model families show that EDA performs best in both settings. The gain persists after 80B-token long-context midtraining of the MoE models, where EDA also performs best in long-context evaluations from 4k to 128k contexts. A compact update analysis and memory-state probes suggest why: EDA keeps the delta-rule corrective write intact while allocating an additional cleanup path most strongly when passive decay is weak. These results suggest that recurrent memory models should decide not only what to write, but also what stale information to erase and where.

  • 18 authors
·
Jun 24

RPMem: Learning Long-Term Recurrent Parametric Memory Across Sessions for LLM Agents

Long-running LLM agents require memory that persists and evolves across sessions. Text-based memory retrieves and reconstructs past interactions at every query, making long-horizon performance increasingly dependent on retrieval quality and contextual reasoning as histories grow. Parametric memory encodes experience directly into model computation, but existing approaches provide limited support for cross-session memory evolution. Their coupling to a specific backbone further restricts memory reuse after model replacement. We introduce RPMem, a two-stage architecture that compiles each session into a model-independent latent memory through forward computation and selectively integrates it with retained memory via a task-trained recurrent gate. The consolidated memory is then mapped to backbone-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) parameters, allowing the encoding capability to transfer when the backbone is replaced. Evaluation across three long-term memory benchmarks and five diverse backbones demonstrates broad generalization with near-constant update cost and memory footprint. With Qwen3-8B on PERMA, RPMem reaches 85.52%, outperforming the strongest parametric and text-based baselines by 5.32 and 12.98 percentage points, respectively. Ablations validate the complementary roles of session compilation and cross-session consolidation, while dynamics analyses reveal that the gate acquires task-specific memory integration strategies. These results establish RPMem as a lifecycle-independent parametric memory framework that maintains evolving cross-session memory that remains reusable across backbone replacements. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Quark-Medical/rpmem/tree/main.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 21

CURE: Local Uncertainty Repair for Block-Parallel Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding mitigates the latency of sequential generation in autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by interleaving draft generation with target verification. However, existing parallel drafting backends often suffer from rapid accuracy degradation over long horizons, leading to high rejection rates during verification and suboptimal wall-clock speedups. We observe that drafting errors are not uniformly distributed but typically stem from localized high-uncertainty tokens that destabilize downstream generation trajectories. Motivated by this token error pattern, we propose CURE, a budget-aware dynamic repair tree designed to repair errors at uncertainty focal points without incurring prohibitive tree-verification overheads. Specifically, our method uses predictive confidence margins to dynamically locate candidate error tokens within a block-parallel draft, expands bounded repair paths only at these fragile nodes, and employs a novel repair resynchronization mechanism to realign draft states post-verification. Evaluations on code-generation benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, and LiveCodeBench-lite) and mathematical reasoning benchmark (GSM8K) demonstrate that CURE increases the average accepted length by 4.2-7.5% over parallel baselines without repair, translating to an end-to-end speedup of 2.66-3.49times over target-only decoding. Furthermore, we provide a plug-and-play repair module compatible with standard parallel drafting frameworks. We also characterize the trade-off between draft compute and verification efficiency.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 31

Coupling Planning with Episodic Memory in LLM Agents for Software Issue Resolution

Resolving a real software issue with a large language model (LLM) agent is a long repair episode, often tens to hundreds of steps spanning exploration, hypothesis, implementation, and verification. Success depends on both the base model's local reasoning and the agent's ability to maintain an evolving plan and remember observations across phases. Existing repository-level agents typically strengthen planning or memory in isolation, leaving long trajectories vulnerable to stale evidence, repeated failed edits, and verification inferred from the agent's own claims instead of execution evidence. We present PMCoder, an issue-resolution agent that couples a hierarchical phase planner with episodic memory. The coupling is bidirectional: the current plan phase conditions memory retrieval, while memory-derived trajectory statistics inform stuck detection and replanning. When available, issue-reproduction verdicts ground verification progress in execution evidence rather than self-reported completion. On SWE-bench Verified, PMCoder resolves an average of 25 more cases (+5.0pp) than a harness-matched baseline, with gains persisting even where the reproduction gate never fires. Further Verified-500 evaluations show the same positive direction across Claude Haiku 4.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and an OpenHands port, with at least 14 additional resolved cases (+2.8pp). Separately, evaluation on TerminalWorld's official sample suggests that the plan-memory substrate transfers beyond issue reports. Ablation and trajectory analyses show where the gains come from: coupling planning and memory outperforms either component alone and reduces repeated failed actions, empty-patch exits, and context-window exhaustion.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 6

Grounded Forcing: Bridging Time-Independent Semantics and Proximal Dynamics in Autoregressive Video Synthesis

Autoregressive video synthesis offers a promising pathway for infinite-horizon generation but is fundamentally hindered by three intertwined challenges: semantic forgetting from context limitations, visual drift due to positional extrapolation, and controllability loss during interactive instruction switching. Current methods often tackle these issues in isolation, limiting long-term coherence. We introduce Grounded Forcing, a novel framework that bridges time-independent semantics and proximal dynamics through three interlocking mechanisms. First, to address semantic forgetting, we propose a Dual Memory KV Cache that decouples local temporal dynamics from global semantic anchors, ensuring long-term semantic coherence and identity stability. Second, to suppress visual drift, we design Dual-Reference RoPE Injection, which confines positional embeddings within the training manifold while rendering global semantics time-invariant. Third, to resolve controllability issues, we develop Asymmetric Proximity Recache, which facilitates smooth semantic inheritance during prompt transitions via proximity-weighted cache updates. These components operate synergistically to tether the generative process to stable semantic cores while accommodating flexible local dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Grounded Forcing significantly enhances long-range consistency and visual stability, establishing a robust foundation for interactive long-form video synthesis.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 12

Dynamic Cheatsheet: Test-Time Learning with Adaptive Memory

Despite their impressive performance on complex tasks, current language models (LMs) typically operate in a vacuum: Each input query is processed separately, without retaining insights from previous attempts. Here, we present Dynamic Cheatsheet (DC), a lightweight framework that endows a black-box LM with a persistent, evolving memory. Rather than repeatedly re-discovering or re-committing the same solutions and mistakes, DC enables models to store and reuse accumulated strategies, code snippets, and general problem-solving insights at inference time. This test-time learning enhances performance substantially across a range of tasks without needing explicit ground-truth labels or human feedback. Leveraging DC, Claude 3.5 Sonnet's accuracy more than doubled on AIME math exams once it began retaining algebraic insights across questions. Similarly, GPT-4o's success rate on Game of 24 increased from 10% to 99% after the model discovered and reused a Python-based solution. In tasks prone to arithmetic mistakes, such as balancing equations, DC enabled GPT-4o and Claude to reach near-perfect accuracy by recalling previously validated code, whereas their baselines stagnated around 50%. Beyond arithmetic challenges, DC yields notable accuracy gains on knowledge-demanding tasks. Claude achieved a 9% improvement in GPQA-Diamond and an 8% boost on MMLU-Pro problems. Crucially, DC's memory is self-curated, focusing on concise, transferable snippets rather than entire transcript. Unlike finetuning or static retrieval methods, DC adapts LMs' problem-solving skills on the fly, without modifying their underlying parameters. Overall, our findings present DC as a promising approach for augmenting LMs with persistent memory, bridging the divide between isolated inference events and the cumulative, experience-driven learning characteristic of human cognition.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025

MemTrain: Self-Supervised Context Memory Training

Memory is an indispensable capability for long-horizon LLM agents, enabling them to preserve and utilize information accumulated across extended interactions. Existing memory-agent approaches are typically trained end-to-end with reinforcement learning on downstream tasks. However, collecting high-quality annotated problems for memory-intensive scenarios is costly, and the resulting training data often lack sufficient diversity to cover general memory behaviors. In this work, we propose MemTrain, a self-supervised training framework for generally enhancing the context-memory capability of LLM agents for more effective downstream post-training. MemTrain introduces two coupled proxy tasks over unlabeled Wikipedia corpora: (1) an end-to-end masked reconstruction objective, which requires the model to recover masked entities after multiple rounds of memory updates, thereby encouraging memory maintenance from the final outcome perspective; and (2) an intermediate memory recall objective, which requires the model to reconstruct masked historical information using intermediate memory states, encouraging faithful compression and memory completeness throughout the interaction process. The two objectives are jointly optimized using GRPO. Extensive experiments on long-text QA and search-based QA benchmarks demonstrate that MemTrain consistently improves downstream memory-intensive reasoning performance across different models, achieving gains of up to 17.67 points over direct task-specific post-training.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 1 2

Mem4D: Decoupling Static and Dynamic Memory for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Reconstructing dense geometry for dynamic scenes from a monocular video is a critical yet challenging task. Recent memory-based methods enable efficient online reconstruction, but they fundamentally suffer from a Memory Demand Dilemma: The memory representation faces an inherent conflict between the long-term stability required for static structures and the rapid, high-fidelity detail retention needed for dynamic motion. This conflict forces existing methods into a compromise, leading to either geometric drift in static structures or blurred, inaccurate reconstructions of dynamic objects. To address this dilemma, we propose Mem4D, a novel framework that decouples the modeling of static geometry and dynamic motion. Guided by this insight, we design a dual-memory architecture: 1) The Transient Dynamics Memory (TDM) focuses on capturing high-frequency motion details from recent frames, enabling accurate and fine-grained modeling of dynamic content; 2) The Persistent Structure Memory (PSM) compresses and preserves long-term spatial information, ensuring global consistency and drift-free reconstruction for static elements. By alternating queries to these specialized memories, Mem4D simultaneously maintains static geometry with global consistency and reconstructs dynamic elements with high fidelity. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance while maintaining high efficiency. Codes will be publicly available.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

Kamera: Unified Position-Invariant Multimodal KV Cache for Training-Free Reuse

Multimodal agents repeatedly re-examine the same video frames, UI screenshots, and rendered artifacts as their context window slides and reasoning iterates, yet every look-back re-encodes from scratch, because prefix caches serve reuse only at a fixed leading position. We show this recompute is avoidable, and identify exactly what naive KV reuse loses: the cross-chunk conditioning a chunk absorbs from its neighbours. This loss is asymmetric. The direct readout of a cached chunk is recovered exactly and for free by the standard state-merge. What remains is a diffuse, low-rank residue concentrated in deep layers, invisible to single-hop retrieval but precisely what multi-hop reasoning binds on. Blind reuse therefore leaves single-hop recall intact while halving multi-hop accuracy; this is the failure mode prior position-independent caches, designed for single-context or single-image reuse, do not address. We repair it with a small, training-free low-rank conditioning patch stored alongside each position-free chunk. Reuse reduces to one operator across MLA, GQA, and MHA: exact RoPE re-rotation to any target position, plus the patch that restores cross-chunk binding. This makes three window operations cheap: reorder (one patch serves every ordering of a cached set), sliding-window survival (surviving chunks relocate via rotation only, zero re-encode), and recall (an evicted chunk is rehydrated by its patch, never re-encoded). A rank-m patch recovers full task accuracy on cross-chunk-binding benchmarks, MM-NIAH across two attention families and two-page doc-QA, at a fraction of the KV footprint, and reconstructs re-prefill KV to within bf16 rounding in a production SGLang kernel across six backbones. The conditioning signal is strongest in redundant vision and video streams, making our solution most impactful where multimodal agents spend their recompute budget.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21

Towards mental time travel: a hierarchical memory for reinforcement learning agents

Reinforcement learning agents often forget details of the past, especially after delays or distractor tasks. Agents with common memory architectures struggle to recall and integrate across multiple timesteps of a past event, or even to recall the details of a single timestep that is followed by distractor tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Chunk Attention Memory (HCAM), which helps agents to remember the past in detail. HCAM stores memories by dividing the past into chunks, and recalls by first performing high-level attention over coarse summaries of the chunks, and then performing detailed attention within only the most relevant chunks. An agent with HCAM can therefore "mentally time-travel" -- remember past events in detail without attending to all intervening events. We show that agents with HCAM substantially outperform agents with other memory architectures at tasks requiring long-term recall, retention, or reasoning over memory. These include recalling where an object is hidden in a 3D environment, rapidly learning to navigate efficiently in a new neighborhood, and rapidly learning and retaining new object names. Agents with HCAM can extrapolate to task sequences much longer than they were trained on, and can even generalize zero-shot from a meta-learning setting to maintaining knowledge across episodes. HCAM improves agent sample efficiency, generalization, and generality (by solving tasks that previously required specialized architectures). Our work is a step towards agents that can learn, interact, and adapt in complex and temporally-extended environments.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28, 2021

KEEP: A KV-Cache-Centric Memory Management System for Efficient Embodied Planning

Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability for complex and long-horizon embodied planning. By keeping track of past experiences and environmental states, memory enables LLMs to maintain a global view, thereby avoiding repetitive exploration. However, existing approaches often store the memory as raw text, leading to excessively long prompts and high prefill latency. While it is possible to store and reuse the KV caches, the efficiency benefits are greatly undermined due to frequent KV cache updates. In this paper, we propose KEEP, a KV-cache-centric memory management system for efficient embodied planning. KEEP features 3 key innovations: (1) a Static-Dynamic Memory Construction algorithm that reduces KV cache recomputation by mixed-granularity memory group; (2) a Multi-hop Memory Re-computation algorithm that dynamically identifies important cross-attention among different memory groups and reconstructs memory interactions iteratively; (3) a Layer-balanced Memory Loading that eliminates unbalanced KV cache loading and cross-attention computation across different layers. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that KEEP achieves 2.68x speedup with negligible accuracy loss compared with text-based memory methods on ALFRED dataset. Compared with the KV re-computation method CacheBlend (EuroSys'25), KEEP shows 4.13% success rate improvement and 1.90x time-to-first-token (TTFT) reduction. Our code is available on https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/KEEP_Embodied_Memory.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 16

RePAIR: Interactive Machine Unlearning through Prompt-Aware Model Repair

Large language models (LLMs) inherently absorb harmful knowledge, misinformation, and personal data during pretraining on large-scale web corpora, with no native mechanism for selective removal. While machine unlearning offers a principled solution, existing approaches are provider-centric, requiring retraining pipelines, curated retain datasets, and direct intervention by model service providers (MSPs), thereby excluding end users from controlling their own data. We introduce Interactive Machine Unlearning (IMU), a new paradigm in which users can instruct LLMs to forget targeted knowledge through natural language at inference time. To realize IMU, we propose RePAIR, a prompt-aware model repair framework comprising (i) a watchdog model for unlearning intent detection, (ii) a surgeon model for generating repair procedures, and (iii) a patient model whose parameters are updated autonomously. At the core of RePAIR, we develop Steering Through Activation Manipulation with PseudoInverse (STAMP), a training-free, single-sample unlearning method that redirects MLP activations toward a refusal subspace via closed-form pseudoinverse updates. Its low-rank variant reduces computational complexity from O(d^3) to O(r^3 + r^2 * d), enabling efficient on-device unlearning with up to ~3x speedup over training-based baselines. Extensive experiments across harmful knowledge suppression, misinformation correction, and personal data erasure demonstrate that RePAIR achieves near-zero forget scores (Acc_f = 0.00, F-RL = 0.00) while preserving model utility (Acc_r up to 84.47, R-RL up to 0.88), outperforming six state-of-the-art baselines. These results establish RePAIR as an effective and practical framework for user-driven model editing, advancing transparent and on-device control over learned knowledge, with potential extensions to multimodal foundation models.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13

LayerRecall: A State-Conditioned Memory Router for Long-Horizon Consistency in Video Generation

Autoregressive video diffusion enables scalable long-video generation by producing chunks from a bounded recent context. While recency-based caching preserves local continuity, it evicts historical cues needed when subjects, objects, scenes, or attributes reappear. Existing memory mechanisms expose models to nonlocal history, but access alone does not ensure effective use. Our analysis reveals that video DiT layers exhibit distinct preferences for current, recent, and distant context, suggesting that long-range memory requires deciding both what to retrieve and where to use it. We introduce LayerRecall, a current-conditioned, layer-selective memory router that retrieves relevant historical K/V states and injects them only into backbone-specific memory-sensitive layers while preserving local attention elsewhere. To reduce reliance on scarce high-quality long-horizon videos and explicit memory-allocation labels, we further propose Cross-Horizon Prediction Matching (CHPM), which uses a privileged long-context reference to supervise the bounded-memory router in prediction space. Across 100 multi-shot evaluation prompts, LayerRecall achieves the best overall results on MemoBench and MovieBench while matching its backbone on VBench-Long, demonstrating stronger long-range recovery without sacrificing local continuity. Qualitative analyses further reveal memory-guided self-correction, whereby initially mismatched local attributes return to their historical appearance without resetting ongoing motion or scene structure. Additional analyses show cross-backbone portability and negligible inference overhead.

Are We Ready For An Agent-Native Memory System?

Memory for large language model (LLM) agents has rapidly evolved from simple retrieval-augmented mechanisms into a data management system that supports persistent information storage, retrieval, update, consolidation, and dynamic lifecycle governance throughout agent execution. Despite this evolution, existing evaluations still benchmark agent memory mainly through end-to-end task success metrics (e.g., F1, BLEU), while treating the underlying system as a monolithic black box. As a result, critical system-level concerns, including operational costs, architectural trade-offs across memory modules, and robustness under dynamic knowledge updates, remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we present a systematic experimental study of agent memory from a data management perspective. We propose an analytical framework that decomposes agent memory into four core modules: memory representation and storage, extraction, retrieval and routing, and maintenance. Under this framework, we evaluate 12 representative memory systems and two reference baselines across five benchmark workloads spanning 11 datasets. Our extensive end-to-end evaluation shows that no single architecture dominates across all scenarios; instead, effectiveness depends heavily on how well the memory structure aligns with the workload bottleneck. Furthermore, through fine-grained ablation studies, we quantify their individual effects on representation fidelity, retrieval precision, update correctness, and long-horizon stability. Finally, we reveal cost-performance trade-offs under realistic workloads, showing localized maintenance is more cost-efficient than global reorganization. Based on these findings, we identify promising directions towards building truly agent-native memory systems. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDataBox/MemoryData.

Exploring Synaptic Resonance in Large Language Models: A Novel Approach to Contextual Memory Integration

Contextual memory integration remains a high challenge in the development of language models, particularly in tasks that require maintaining coherence over extended sequences. Traditional approaches, such as self-attention mechanisms and memory-augmented architectures, often prioritize short-term dependencies, leading to fragmentation and inconsistency in long-range contextual understanding. Inspired by principles of synaptic plasticity observed in biological neural systems, a novel mechanism, Synaptic Resonance, is introduced to dynamically reinforce relevant memory pathways during training and inference. Unlike static memory representations, this mechanism continuously adjusts synaptic weight matrices based on contextual relevance, allowing for improved information retention without excessive computational overhead. Evaluations conducted on an open-source language model demonstrate reductions in perplexity, enhancements in contextual coherence, and increased robustness against input noise, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforcement-driven memory modulation. Comparative analysis against baseline models further reveals that the proposed approach achieves higher memory retention efficiency while maintaining computational feasibility. The architectural modifications integrate seamlessly into existing transformer-based frameworks, ensuring stable convergence and efficient inference without sacrificing scalability. Applications benefiting from improved long-term contextual consistency, such as dialogue systems and document summarization, stand to gain from this approach. Empirical findings suggest that dynamically reinforced memory pathways offer a promising alternative to conventional memory mechanisms, addressing longstanding limitations in extended sequence modeling.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 15, 2025

Mela: Test-Time Memory Consolidation based on Transformation Hypothesis

Memory consolidation, the process by which transient experiences are transformed into stable, structured representations, is a foundational organizing principle in the human brain, yet it remains largely unexplored as a design principle for modern sequence models. In this work, we leverage established neuroscientific theories of memory consolidation and cross-frequency coupling to propose the Hierarchical Memory Module (HMM), a neural memory architecture composed of two functionally distinct sub-modules that operate at different update frequencies. Inspired by the transformation hypothesis, the low-frequency sub-module produces high-level representations that capture abstract, gist-level knowledge, while the high-frequency sub-module produces fine-grained representations that preserve richer episodic detail. The final memory output is dynamically reconstructed as a context-dependent combination of both representations, analogous to the reconstructive nature of human memory retrieval. We integrate HMM into a Transformer-based language decoder to form Mela, a family of memory-augmented language models that perform online memory consolidation at test time. To further exploit the multi-granularity memory representations produced by HMM, we introduce MemStack, a method that distributes different levels of memory features across the early layers of the decoder without introducing additional tokens. Experiments on language modeling demonstrate that Mela outperforms Transformer baselines across all the model sizes. Moreover, with the pretrained context length fixed at 4K, Mela maintains performance on significantly longer contexts, whereas Transformer baselines degrade rapidly beyond their training length. Extensive ablation studies validate the contribution of each component and provide guidance for practical configuration.

MusubiAI Musubi
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May 10 1

RaMem: Contextual Reinstatement for Long-term Agentic Memory

Long-term memory has become increasingly important for LLM agents that operate across extended interactions and evolving task contexts. Recent memory systems have made past experiences more persistent, compact, and retrievable, but retrieval alone does not ensure that a memory provides valid evidence for the current query. When experiences are compressed into reusable fragments, memories from different situations may appear equally relevant if they involve recurring entities or user states. We refer to this failure as context collapse: memories lose the surrounding context needed to judge whether they provide valid evidence for the current query. To address this problem, we propose Contextual Reinstatement for Agentic Memory (RaMem), a framework that turns retrieved memory fragments into contextually verifiable evidence. RaMem operates through four coordinated stages: (i) evidence anchoring grounds each memory in its original episodic conditions, especially event time, mention time, session span, and participants; (ii) recall condition induction derives the evidence conditions implied by the query; (iii) validity-aware retrieval uses these conditions to prioritize context-compatible memories while retaining content-relevant candidates as fallback evidence; and (iv) context-preserved synthesis keeps the selected memories' structured context available to the generator. Experiments on long-term memory benchmarks show that RaMem consistently improves performance over strong memory baselines, with average F1 gains of more than 10% across several backbones.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 21

Memory Retention Is Not Enough to Master Memory Tasks in Reinforcement Learning

Effective decision-making in the real world depends on memory that is both stable and adaptive: environments change over time, and agents must retain relevant information over long horizons while also updating or overwriting outdated content when circumstances shift. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) benchmarks and memory-augmented agents focus primarily on retention, leaving the equally critical ability of memory rewriting largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark that explicitly tests continual memory updating under partial observability, i.e. the natural setting where an agent must rely on memory rather than current observations, and use it to compare recurrent, transformer-based, and structured memory architectures. Our experiments reveal that classic recurrent models, despite their simplicity, demonstrate greater flexibility and robustness in memory rewriting tasks than modern structured memories, which succeed only under narrow conditions, and transformer-based agents, which often fail beyond trivial retention cases. These findings expose a fundamental limitation of current approaches and emphasize the necessity of memory mechanisms that balance stable retention with adaptive updating. Our work highlights this overlooked challenge, introduces benchmarks to evaluate it, and offers insights for designing future RL agents with explicit and trainable forgetting mechanisms. Code: https://quartz-admirer.github.io/Memory-Rewriting/

  • 4 authors
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Jan 21

AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration

The rapid evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents has necessitated robust memory systems to support cohesive long-term interaction and complex reasoning. Benefiting from the strong capabilities of LLMs, recent research focus has shifted from simple context extension to the development of dedicated agentic memory systems. However, existing approaches typically rely on rigid retrieval granularity, accumulation-heavy maintenance strategies, and coarse-grained update mechanisms. These design choices create a persistent mismatch between stored information and task-specific reasoning demands, while leading to the unchecked accumulation of logical inconsistencies over time. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration (AMA), a novel framework that leverages coordinated agents to manage memory across multiple granularities. AMA employs a hierarchical memory design that dynamically aligns retrieval granularity with task complexity. Specifically, the Constructor and Retriever jointly enable multi-granularity memory construction and adaptive query routing. The Judge verifies the relevance and consistency of retrieved content, triggering iterative retrieval when evidence is insufficient or invoking the Refresher upon detecting logical conflicts. The Refresher then enforces memory consistency by performing targeted updates or removing outdated entries. Extensive experiments on challenging long-context benchmarks show that AMA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while reducing token consumption by approximately 80% compared to full-context methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in maintaining retrieval precision and long-term memory consistency.

  • 9 authors
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Jan 28

Can Agents Forget When Asked? A Benchmark for Memory Unlearning in LLM Agents

Long-term memory has become a core component of large language model (LLM) agents. As agents accumulate personal information over long-term use, users increasingly ask them to delete sensitive or outdated facts. A memory system should honor such requests. It should remove exactly what was requested and keep the rest of its memory intact. However, existing memory benchmarks evaluate only memory writing, retrieval, and organization, so whether agents can forget at the user's explicit request remains under-evaluated. To address this gap, we propose Bemula, the first benchmark dedicated to memory unlearning. It comprises 50 multi-session dialogue instances, 135 forget requests of six types, and 1,742 test questions. Each dialogue has a control version without the requests, so that only systems that have stored the target can earn credit for forgetting. Across the paired versions, five test suites measure storage, removal of the requested information, preservation of unrelated memories, relearning of similar facts, and resistance to extraction attacks. On Bemula, we evaluate six mainstream memory systems under three backbone LLMs, together with the Full Context LLM on two of them. The results are negative. Across all evaluated systems and backbones, no system passes more than 1.5% of forget requests end to end, and most pass none at all. These systems either leave the requested information extractable under simple attacks or delete far more than requested. Memory unlearning therefore remains an open challenge for agent memory design. We release our data and code at https://github.com/Nboxff/bemula-benchmark.

  • 7 authors
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Oct 12

AgentTether: Graph-Guided Diagnosis and Runtime Intervention for Reliable LLM Agent Operation

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for multi-step, stateful tool-use tasks, yet production reliability remains limited. Unlike static software repair, agent repair must recover dynamic trajectories whose early decisions can propagate into later errors and external state changes. Existing automatic remedies address only part of this problem: blind retry adds no diagnosis, outcome feedback says whether a run failed but not where or why, and self-reflection often lacks grounded evidence to prevent the same failure from recurring. We present AgentTether, a run-time repair framework that automates post-run diagnosis and guided recovery without modifying the underlying agent or environment. AgentTether abstracts each run into Transition Units, links them through a dependency-aware Critical Transition Graph, and localizes failure-critical subtrajectories by combining an offline normal-behavior model with a run-local graph detector. It then converts the localized cause into behavior-scoped guidance backed by cross-iteration Repair Memory, and can optionally apply guarded run-time intervention to keep the correction active during re-execution. The same design can be deployed as an offline diagnostic-and-guidance tool or as an online repair layer. We evaluate AgentTether on 261 tau-bench tasks across three domains with Qwen3.7-max, and test cross-model transfer on Banking with GPT-5.4. On the hardest Banking domain, AgentTether repairs 59.04% (49/83) of initially failed Qwen3.7-max tasks and 65.12% (56/86) of initially failed GPT-5.4 tasks. Overall, AgentTether improves repair effectiveness while reducing agent turns and end-to-end approach tokens, suggesting a practical reliability layer that can wrap existing agent deployments, reduce wasted re-execution, and improve recovery without retraining the agent.

  • 8 authors
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Jul 6

GenMem: Generative Symbolic Memory for Self-Evolving Harness

Long-term memory supports the self-evolution of LLM agents by retaining experience and skills across tasks and enabling their retrieval, reuse, and revision in subsequent long-horizon decision-making. Yet existing memory management approaches remain limited to discriminative retrieval and to address the sparse, hierarchical, and highly redundant structure of reusable experience: only a small, task-dependent subset of trajectories and memories warrants retention, retrieval, or revision. Learning these operations is further complicated by sparse, delayed, and indirect task-level feedback, with weak supervision across the memory lifecycle. Moreover, continual memory evolution introduces an architectural tension as addressing invariance: stored experience is perpetually revised, yet the addressing interface consumed by learned retrieval policies must remain stable. To address, we present GenMem, which reformulates memory management as generative symbolic addressing. Its core mechanism is the Symbolic Identifier (SID), a multi-level discrete token tuple drawn from a Cartesian-product address space that factorizes a million-scale sparse memory space using fewer than one hundred discrete symbols. Instead of generating ever-changing raw content, the memory agent learns to generate SIDs, while memory evolution rewrites the payload at a fixed address without shifting the address itself. Architecturally, GenMem couples a MemRetriever and a MemEvolver within a multi-agent harness, trained via GRPO with dense process and outcome rewards with two-channels optimization. Under offline memory evolution, experiments spanning ALFWorld, WebShop, multi-hop QA, medical reasoning, and deep research evaluate GenMem against strong memory-augmented baselines...

  • 10 authors
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Sep 27

SLVMBench: Skill Learning from Video Memory

We introduce Skill Learning from Video Memory (SLVMBench), the first benchmark that jointly evaluates whether video large language models (video-LLMs) can learn skills from long video memory and apply them to real-time tasks. SLVMBench presents models with 2-3 hour video streams that contain a tutorial video embedded in a stream of arbitrary irrelevant videos, resembling real-world human learning practices. Video-LLMs are asked to apply the acquired skill to answer real-time questions about an ongoing video. Unlike long-video understanding benchmarks that emphasize passive comprehension and skill-learning benchmarks that rely on short, immediate demonstrations, SLVMBench tests the full pipeline of memorizing and extracting procedural knowledge, as well as transferring it to real-time tasks. Moreover, rigorous human annotations feature sub-second-level temporal calibration, manually engineered questions eliminating common-sense guessing, and collated tutorials to ensure coverage of the required skills. Evaluations on state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source video LLMs show that video-LLMs struggle substantially with learning and applying skill knowledge from videos. Moreover, performance degrades markedly when the skill knowledge is placed within a long video memory. These results reveal a key limitation of existing video LLMs and position SLVMBench as the first benchmark for studying real-time skill acquisition and application from long-context video memory.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 12

APM-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-session Persistent Memory for Egocentric Streaming Video Assistants

To serve as real-world personal assistants, streaming video models need persistent memory that retains past experiences for later use. Yet existing streaming benchmarks and methods often focus on individual continuous videos or short clips, overlooking that real-world interactions are often intermittent and require memory to persist across interruptions. To fill this gap, we introduce APM-Bench, which reformulates real-world streaming interaction as multi-session life trajectories. It contains 549 sessions, 104 trajectories, and 2,719 candidates, spanning both objective and open-ended questions. Each session is a video with fine-grained annotations, and sessions within a trajectory revolve around related activities. Models then use persistent memory to answer questions about past sessions and provide proactive responses while maintaining real-time interaction. This raises challenges: persistent memory must be storable, selectively retain information, be injected at the right time, and remain efficient. Moreover, finite storage may leave required evidence unavailable, so assistants should recognize missing evidence. Therefore, we systematically evaluate general video models under different memory protocols and diverse specialized streaming memory systems, and test whether models acknowledge insufficient evidence. Our evaluation reveals a clear utility--latency--storage trade-off: existing methods still struggle to simultaneously achieve reliable long-term recall, low overhead, and effective proactive assistance across sessions. APM-Bench provides a comprehensive testbed for developing and comparing persistent memory systems under realistic streaming conditions. We hope it encourages future work that jointly considers utility, latency, and storage toward more practical persistent memory for real-world streaming assistants.

MemoryGraft: Persistent Compromise of LLM Agents via Poisoned Experience Retrieval

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to persist experiences and refine future performance. While this experience learning capability enhances agentic autonomy, it introduces a critical, unexplored attack surface, i.e., the trust boundary between an agent's reasoning core and its own past. In this paper, we introduce MemoryGraft. It is a novel indirect injection attack that compromises agent behavior not through immediate jailbreaks, but by implanting malicious successful experiences into the agent's long-term memory. Unlike traditional prompt injections that are transient, or standard RAG poisoning that targets factual knowledge, MemoryGraft exploits the agent's semantic imitation heuristic which is the tendency to replicate patterns from retrieved successful tasks. We demonstrate that an attacker who can supply benign ingestion-level artifacts that the agent reads during execution can induce it to construct a poisoned RAG store where a small set of malicious procedure templates is persisted alongside benign experiences. When the agent later encounters semantically similar tasks, union retrieval over lexical and embedding similarity reliably surfaces these grafted memories, and the agent adopts the embedded unsafe patterns, leading to persistent behavioral drift across sessions. We validate MemoryGraft on MetaGPT's DataInterpreter agent with GPT-4o and find that a small number of poisoned records can account for a large fraction of retrieved experiences on benign workloads, turning experience-based self-improvement into a vector for stealthy and durable compromise. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, our code and evaluation data are available at https://github.com/Jacobhhy/Agent-Memory-Poisoning.

  • 2 authors
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Dec 18, 2025

Just-in-Time Memory: Learning to Curate Task-Adaptive Memory for LLM Agents

Agentic memory systems reuse past experience to improve future performance, yet most existing designs curate memory at write time: once a task is completed, its trajectory is distilled into a fixed artifact, such as a reflection, workflow, skill, or reasoning strategy, that is later retrieved by similarity. This forces the system to decide what is worth remembering before the future query is known, irreversibly discarding information and producing a query-independent summary that must serve many possible downstream tasks. Learning such a write-time curator is also difficult because the value of a storage decision may only become apparent when a relevant query arrives, potentially many tasks later, creating a long-horizon credit-assignment problem. We instead retain raw trajectories and defer curation until read time, when the current task is known. Given the retrieved traces and the new task, a memory curator synthesizes a compact, task-adaptive payload tailored to the immediate need. Because this payload is consumed on the same task, the curator can be trained directly from immediate task success, avoiding delayed utility signals and the need to artificially group related tasks. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and τ^2-bench, our Just-in-Time Memory (JitMem) consistently outperforms no-memory agents as well as heuristic and learned write-time memory methods, improving over the strongest baseline by 16.2, 16.3, and 3.9 absolute success-rate points, respectively. Notably, even an untrained curator is already competitive with or surpasses these baselines, showing that task-adaptive read-time curation itself is a major source of the gain; training the curator further compounds the improvement.

Mem-α: Learning Memory Construction via Reinforcement Learning

Large language model (LLM) agents are constrained by limited context windows, necessitating external memory systems for long-term information understanding. Current memory-augmented agents typically depend on pre-defined instructions and tools for memory updates. However, language models may lack the ability to determine which information to store, how to structure it, and when to update it, especially as memory systems become more complex. This results in suboptimal memory construction and information loss. To this end, we propose Mem-alpha, a reinforcement learning framework that trains agents to effectively manage complex memory systems through interaction and feedback. We also construct a specialized training dataset spanning diverse multi-turn interaction patterns paired with comprehensive evaluation questions designed to teach effective memory management. During training, agents process sequential information chunks, learn to extract and store relevant content, then update the memory system. The reward signal derives from downstream question-answering accuracy over the full interaction history, directly optimizing for memory construction. To illustrate the effectiveness of our training framework, we design a memory architecture comprising core, episodic, and semantic components, equipped with multiple tools for memory operations. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that Mem-alpha achieves significant improvements over existing memory-augmented agent baselines. Despite being trained exclusively on instances with a maximum length of 30k tokens, our agents exhibit remarkable generalization to sequences exceeding 400k tokens, over 13x the training length, highlighting the robustness of Mem-alpha.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 30, 2025 1

Efficient Continual Learning in Language Models via Thalamically Routed Cortical Columns

Large language models deployed in the wild must adapt to evolving data, user behavior, and task mixtures without erasing previously acquired capabilities. In practice, this remains difficult: sequential updates induce catastrophic forgetting, while many stabilization methods rely on external procedures that are costly, brittle, or difficult to scale. We present TRC^{2} (Thalamically Routed Cortical Columns), a decoder-only architecture that makes continual adaptation a property of the backbone itself. TRC^{2} combines stacked cortical columns with a thalamic modulatory pathway for selective inter-column communication and a hippocampal pathway for event-selective retrieval, delayed surprise-based writing, and replay-driven consolidation. This design localizes fast plasticity while preserving a slower stable computation pathway. We further introduce a causal memory-update scheme and an online replay controller that adjusts consolidation strength from measured forgetting. Across a task-sequential language-modeling stream over C4, WikiText-103, and GSM8K, TRC^{2} consistently improves task-boundary modeling quality and substantially reduces cumulative forgetting relative to Transformer, Mamba, MoE, and DeepSeek baselines trained under the same pipeline. Ablations show that the thalamic and hippocampal components are central to the retention gains, while the full model remains competitive in throughput and training cost.

  • 1 authors
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Feb 25 2

Digital Forgetting in Large Language Models: A Survey of Unlearning Methods

The objective of digital forgetting is, given a model with undesirable knowledge or behavior, obtain a new model where the detected issues are no longer present. The motivations for forgetting include privacy protection, copyright protection, elimination of biases and discrimination, and prevention of harmful content generation. Effective digital forgetting has to be effective (meaning how well the new model has forgotten the undesired knowledge/behavior), retain the performance of the original model on the desirable tasks, and be scalable (in particular forgetting has to be more efficient than retraining from scratch on just the tasks/data to be retained). This survey focuses on forgetting in large language models (LLMs). We first provide background on LLMs, including their components, the types of LLMs, and their usual training pipeline. Second, we describe the motivations, types, and desired properties of digital forgetting. Third, we introduce the approaches to digital forgetting in LLMs, among which unlearning methodologies stand out as the state of the art. Fourth, we provide a detailed taxonomy of machine unlearning methods for LLMs, and we survey and compare current approaches. Fifth, we detail datasets, models and metrics used for the evaluation of forgetting, retaining and runtime. Sixth, we discuss challenges in the area. Finally, we provide some concluding remarks.

  • 7 authors
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Apr 1, 2024

TraceCoder: A Trace-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Debugging of LLM-Generated Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate code with subtle but critical bugs, especially for complex tasks. Existing automated repair methods typically rely on superficial pass/fail signals, offering limited visibility into program behavior and hindering precise error localization. In addition, without a way to learn from prior failures, repair processes often fall into repetitive and inefficient cycles. To overcome these challenges, we present TraceCoder, a collaborative multi-agent framework that emulates the observe-analyze-repair process of human experts. The framework first instruments the code with diagnostic probes to capture fine-grained runtime traces, enabling deep insight into its internal execution. It then conducts causal analysis on these traces to accurately identify the root cause of the failure. This process is further enhanced by a novel Historical Lesson Learning Mechanism (HLLM), which distills insights from prior failed repair attempts to inform subsequent correction strategies and prevent recurrence of similar mistakes. To ensure stable convergence, a Rollback Mechanism enforces that each repair iteration constitutes a strict improvement toward the correct solution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that TraceCoder achieves up to a 34.43\% relative improvement in Pass@1 accuracy over existing advanced baselines. Ablation studies verify the significance of each system component, with the iterative repair process alone contributing a 65.61\% relative gain in accuracy. Furthermore, TraceCoder significantly outperforms leading iterative methods in terms of both accuracy and cost-efficiency.

  • 6 authors
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Feb 6

Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

Large Language Models face challenges in long-horizon agentic tasks as their constrained memory is easily overwhelmed by distracting or irrelevant context. Existing working memory methods typically rely on external, heuristic mechanisms that are decoupled from the agent's core policy. In this work, we reframe working memory management as a learnable, intrinsic capability. We propose a novel framework, Memory-as-Action, where an agent actively manages its working memory by executing explicit editing operations as part of a unified policy. This formulation allows an agent, trained via reinforcement learning, to balance memory curation against long-term task objectives under given resource constraints. However, such memory editing actions break the standard assumption of a continuously growing prefix in LLM interactions, leading to what we call trajectory fractures. These non-prefix changes disrupt the causal continuity required by standard policy gradient methods, making those methods inapplicable. To address this, we propose a new algorithm, Dynamic Context Policy Optimization, which enables stable end-to-end reinforcement learning by segmenting trajectories at memory action points and applying trajectory-level advantages to the resulting action segments. Our results demonstrate that jointly optimizing for task reasoning and memory management in an end-to-end fashion not only reduces overall computational consumption but also improves task performance, driven by adaptive context curation strategies tailored to the model's intrinsic capabilities.

Breaking the Model Forgetting Cycle in Long-Incremental 3D Object Detection

Incremental 3D object detection requires a detector to learn novel object classes while remembering previously learned ones over sequentially arriving data. Previous methods, primarily based on pseudo-labeling, perform reasonably in short-incremental stages but still suffer from severe model forgetting when dealing with long-incremental sequences. We investigate this failure and reveal a detrimental self-reinforcing cycle: data distribution shift of novel classes causes model forgetting on old classes, which further produces accumulated error in pseudo-labeling that exacerbates model degradation. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the human learning process and propose the Learning-Dynamics-driven Memory and Review (LDMR) framework. LDMR monitors per-class detection quality at periodic training checkpoints and uses these learning-dynamics signals to drive two innovative mechanisms, namely (i) human-like intra-stage review that divides each incremental stage into multiple sub-stages' training and concentrates on remembering the most-forgotten objects, and (ii) scene-aware cross-stage memory evolution that evolves a memory bank to transfer knowledge between two consecutive stages by jointly considering scene learnability and diversity. Extensive experiments across multiple long-incremental protocols on indoor benchmarks SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2 show that LDMR substantially mitigates the model forgetting and outperforms all baselines by a clear margin. Code is available at https://github.com/qianpeisheng/LDMR.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 15

Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution

Procedural memory enables large language model (LLM) agents to internalize "how-to" knowledge, theoretically reducing redundant trial-and-error. However, existing frameworks predominantly suffer from a "passive accumulation" paradigm, treating memory as a static append-only archive. To bridge the gap between static storage and dynamic reasoning, we propose ReMe (Remember Me, Refine Me), a comprehensive framework for experience-driven agent evolution. ReMe innovates across the memory lifecycle via three mechanisms: 1) multi-faceted distillation, which extracts fine-grained experiences by recognizing success patterns, analyzing failure triggers and generating comparative insights; 2) context-adaptive reuse, which tailors historical insights to new contexts via scenario-aware indexing; and 3) utility-based refinement, which autonomously adds valid memories and prunes outdated ones to maintain a compact, high-quality experience pool. Extensive experiments on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld demonstrate that ReMe establishes a new state-of-the-art in agent memory system. Crucially, we observe a significant memory-scaling effect: Qwen3-8B equipped with ReMe outperforms larger, memoryless Qwen3-14B, suggesting that self-evolving memory provides a computation-efficient pathway for lifelong learning. We release our code and the reme.library dataset to facilitate further research.

  • 7 authors
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Dec 11, 2025

A Closer Look on Memorization in Tabular Diffusion Model: A Data-Centric Perspective

Diffusion models have shown strong performance in generating high-quality tabular data, but they carry privacy risks by reproducing exact training samples. While prior work focuses on dataset-level augmentation to reduce memorization, little is known about which individual samples contribute most. We present the first data-centric study of memorization dynamics in tabular diffusion models. We quantify memorization for each real sample based on how many generated samples are flagged as replicas, using a relative distance ratio. Our empirical analysis reveals a heavy-tailed distribution of memorization counts: a small subset of samples contributes disproportionately to leakage, confirmed via sample-removal experiments. To understand this, we divide real samples into top- and non-top-memorized groups and analyze their training-time behaviors. We track when each sample is first memorized and monitor per-epoch memorization intensity (AUC). Memorized samples are memorized slightly earlier and show stronger signals in early training. Based on these insights, we propose DynamicCut, a two-stage, model-agnostic mitigation method: (a) rank samples by epoch-wise intensity, (b) prune a tunable top fraction, and (c) retrain on the filtered dataset. Across multiple tabular datasets and models, DynamicCut reduces memorization with minimal impact on data diversity and downstream performance. It also complements augmentation-based defenses. Furthermore, DynamicCut enables cross-model transferability: high-ranked samples identified from one model (e.g., a diffusion model) are also effective for reducing memorization when removed from others, such as GANs and VAEs.

  • 7 authors
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May 24

The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation

Advances in generative models have improved video fidelity, enabling long-horizon generation, interactive world modeling, and evolving visual environments. Autoregressive (AR) video generation extends visual sequences through causal rollouts. However, a fundamental bottleneck emerges: as the generated sequence expands, practical models must operate under strictly bounded context windows, storage, and computational limits. Consequently, critical historical information, e.g., entity identities, dynamic states, and intervention-induced causal changes, often leaves the active context long before its relevance diminishes. Overcoming this limitation and maintaining temporal persistence constitutes a fundamental memory problem. We present a systematic and comprehensive review of memory mechanisms in AR video generation. We formulate memory operationally as persistent historical information maintained across outer AR steps, capable of influencing future generation even after the originating evidence is no longer locally accessible. Building upon this unified framework, we organize the literature through five complementary perspectives: (I) Forms, the representational carriers of history; (II) Functions, the specific semantic and physical information requiring preservation; (III) Operations, the lifecycle of writing, reading, updating, managing, and integrating memory; (IV) Learning, the optimization of memory behaviors under closed-loop rollouts; and (V) Evaluation, the paradigms for diagnosing genuine memory capabilities. We conclude by synthesizing open challenges, including composable and resource-aware memory architectures, trustworthy state updating, self-rollout learning, and standardized evaluation. By bridging representations, mechanisms, and learning paradigms, this paper establishes a structured foundation for developing reliable, memory-conditioned video generation systems.

  • 25 authors
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Sep 22 2

SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluation

Continual-learning agents are systems of models, harnesses, and memory operating over long multi-session horizons. Evaluating and training them requires interleaving tasks with agent-side events such as session stop and start, crons, and memory consolidation. Yet existing benchmarks and training frameworks schedule only the benchmark's own events, leaving each benchmark and agent pair to build a custom scheduling loop. We present SCLATE, an execution substrate where benchmarks and unmodified agents each add their events to one open event scheduler through an adapter. A hybrid simulated clock runs these events on a shared timeline, flowing in real time while the agent works and skipping idle gaps, which compresses a month-long scenario into hours. SCLATE also serves as a rollout engine that runs any agent's harness and memory unmodified, recording the tokens and log probabilities of every model call through an in-container proxy. We port seven benchmarks to SCLATE and compare ten unmodified harness and memory configurations head to head on ten models. The comparison shows that an added memory system does not reliably beat the harness's native memory and that models differ widely in how they use the same harness and memory. We then post-train Qwen3.5-4B through unmodified harnesses and memory systems. The model learns to use both, reading 6.8x fewer file lines with a 16.7-point higher SWE-bench Verified pass rate, and writing richer memory records, while its held-out MetaClaw accuracy rises by up to 11.8 points.

  • 6 authors
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Sep 28

Memory as a Controlled Process: Learned Adaptive Memory Management for LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks. Yet nearly all existing approaches, from graph-structured memories to reflective insight stores, access memory through fixed, hand-designed heuristics. We argue that this static view of memory is a core bottleneck for agentic learning because optimal memory behavior is fundamentally context-dependent. The early stages of the tasks, benefit from minimal retrieval because memory is sparse; recurring goal types benefit from plan reuse rather than generic nearest-neighbor lookup; stuck agents benefit from re-retrieval with alternative queries; and across long task streams, the memory store itself must be consolidated and pruned to remain useful. We present Memory as a Controlled Process (MemCon), a framework that models memory operations as a Markov Decision Process and learns an online policy that adaptively decides when, what, and how much to retrieve, when to inject a distilled plan, and when to consolidate or forget. MemCon is backend-agnostic: it wraps any existing memory implementation, learns from task-by-task binary feedback with no pretraining and no additional LLM calls, and uses a lightweight tabular contextual bandit with UCB exploration that converges within tens of tasks. Across 6 benchmarks, 3 agent frameworks, and 3 LLM backbones, MemCon consistently outperforms multiple memory baselines by up to 15.2 points in task success while reducing token consumption by 5--20%.

  • 14 authors
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Jul 14

Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents:Mechanisms, Evaluation, and Emerging Frontiers

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in settings where a single context window is far too small to capture what has happened, what was learned, and what should not be repeated. Memory -- the ability to persist, organize, and selectively recall information across interactions -- is what turns a stateless text generator into a genuinely adaptive agent. This survey offers a structured account of how memory is designed, implemented, and evaluated in modern LLM-based agents, covering work from 2022 through early 2026. We formalize agent memory as a write--manage--read loop tightly coupled with perception and action, then introduce a three-dimensional taxonomy spanning temporal scope, representational substrate, and control policy. Five mechanism families are examined in depth: context-resident compression, retrieval-augmented stores, reflective self-improvement, hierarchical virtual context, and policy-learned management. On the evaluation side, we trace the shift from static recall benchmarks to multi-session agentic tests that interleave memory with decision-making, analyzing four recent benchmarks that expose stubborn gaps in current systems. We also survey applications where memory is the differentiating factor -- personal assistants, coding agents, open-world games, scientific reasoning, and multi-agent teamwork -- and address the engineering realities of write-path filtering, contradiction handling, latency budgets, and privacy governance. The paper closes with open challenges: continual consolidation, causally grounded retrieval, trustworthy reflection, learned forgetting, and multimodal embodied memory.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 8

MARCH: Scaling Recurrent Memory with Content-Routed State Anchors

Transformers owe much of their strong long-context retrieval capability to a token-level memory that grows with context length. This flexibility, however, incurs a quadratic computation complexity during training and a key--value cache that grows linearly during autoregressive inference. Recurrent alternatives offer efficient decoding by compressing the entire history into a fixed-size state, but often underperform on recall-intensive tasks since earlier associations usually get overwritten by subsequent updates, and only the most recent contextual information is retained. In this paper, we introduce Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that effectively scales state-space models beyond a fixed-size dimension, while maintaining computational efficiency over long-sequences. MARCH periodically caches cumulative recurrent-state checkpoints as state anchors and associates each anchor with a compact, content-conditioned anchor key. This lets MARCH maintain a memory bank, which can grow as context length increases, providing a controllable trade-off between historical resolution and memory cost. At each token, MARCH produces an anchor query to attend all causally available state anchors, and the output is calculated as an attention-style aggregation over all historical anchors along the current state. We show that after standard pretraining, MARCH consistently outperforms multiple linear attention variants across commonsense reasoning, LongBench, and in-context retrieval. These results demonstrate that content-routed state caching substantially strengthens recurrent long-range memory while preserving its native computation path.

  • 9 authors
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Aug 11 5

vAttention: Dynamic Memory Management for Serving LLMs without PagedAttention

Efficient use of GPU memory is essential for high throughput LLM inference. Prior systems reserved memory for the KV-cache ahead-of-time, resulting in wasted capacity due to internal fragmentation. Inspired by OS-based virtual memory systems, vLLM proposed PagedAttention to enable dynamic memory allocation for KV-cache. This approach eliminates fragmentation, enabling high-throughput LLM serving with larger batch sizes. However, to be able to allocate physical memory dynamically, PagedAttention changes the layout of KV-cache from contiguous virtual memory to non-contiguous virtual memory. This change requires attention kernels to be rewritten to support paging, and serving framework to implement a memory manager. Thus, the PagedAttention model leads to software complexity, portability issues, redundancy and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose vAttention for dynamic KV-cache memory management. In contrast to PagedAttention, vAttention retains KV-cache in contiguous virtual memory and leverages low-level system support for demand paging, that already exists, to enable on-demand physical memory allocation. Thus, vAttention unburdens the attention kernel developer from having to explicitly support paging and avoids re-implementation of memory management in the serving framework. We show that vAttention enables seamless dynamic memory management for unchanged implementations of various attention kernels. vAttention also generates tokens up to 1.97x faster than vLLM, while processing input prompts up to 3.92x and 1.45x faster than the PagedAttention variants of FlashAttention and FlashInfer.

  • 5 authors
·
May 7, 2024

ReLoop2: Building Self-Adaptive Recommendation Models via Responsive Error Compensation Loop

Industrial recommender systems face the challenge of operating in non-stationary environments, where data distribution shifts arise from evolving user behaviors over time. To tackle this challenge, a common approach is to periodically re-train or incrementally update deployed deep models with newly observed data, resulting in a continual training process. However, the conventional learning paradigm of neural networks relies on iterative gradient-based updates with a small learning rate, making it slow for large recommendation models to adapt. In this paper, we introduce ReLoop2, a self-correcting learning loop that facilitates fast model adaptation in online recommender systems through responsive error compensation. Inspired by the slow-fast complementary learning system observed in human brains, we propose an error memory module that directly stores error samples from incoming data streams. These stored samples are subsequently leveraged to compensate for model prediction errors during testing, particularly under distribution shifts. The error memory module is designed with fast access capabilities and undergoes continual refreshing with newly observed data samples during the model serving phase to support fast model adaptation. We evaluate the effectiveness of ReLoop2 on three open benchmark datasets as well as a real-world production dataset. The results demonstrate the potential of ReLoop2 in enhancing the responsiveness and adaptiveness of recommender systems operating in non-stationary environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 14, 2023

SWIFT: Prompt-Adaptive Memory for Efficient Interactive Long Video Generation

Streaming long-video generation faces a central challenge in continuous semantic switching, requiring adaptive memory to preserve coherent visual evolution. Current approaches rely on cache rebuilding at prompt boundaries or fixed memory budgets, but they introduce redundant computation and limit flexible semantic adaptation. This limitation arises from a mismatch between cached video history and prompt updates, as memory preserves visual continuity while prompt switches demand rapid semantic adaptation. Motivated by this observation, we present SWIFT, Semantic Windowing and Injection for Flexible Transitions, a training-free framework for multi-prompt long-video generation that enables efficient semantic switching while preserving temporal coherence in causal video diffusion models. SWIFT introduces a lightweight Semantic Injection Cache that augments cached video memory rather than reconstructing it from scratch at every prompt boundary. To avoid uniformly perturbing all attention channels, we further perform head-wise semantic injection, so that each attention head receives a prompt update proportional to its alignment with the current video state. In addition, we introduce an Adaptive Dynamic Window that allocates temporal memory according to prompt phase, using larger local context near switching boundaries and smaller windows during stable segments to reduce average inference cost. To preserve long-range semantic consistency under compressed local attention, we further maintain segment-level semantic anchors that summarize prompt-conditioned video history and reintroduce it as compact memory tokens. Compared with current state-of-the-art methods, SWIFT preserves generation quality while achieving 22.6 FPS on a single H100 GPU, establishing a substantially more efficient solution for multi-prompt long-video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShanwenTan/SWIFT.

  • 7 authors
·
May 9

AdaMEM: Test-Time Adaptive Memory for Language Agents

A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions. While recent work demonstrates the promise of agentic memory mechanisms, most systems restrict retrieval to episode initiation. Consequently, agents are forced to rely on static guidance that becomes increasingly misaligned as long-horizon tasks unfold. To address this rigidity, we propose the Adaptive Memory Agent (AdaMEM), a novel framework for agent test-time adaptation. Without updating model parameters online, AdaMEM adapts agent behavior via a hybrid memory architecture: it maintains a long-term trajectory memory of raw experiences collected offline while generating dynamic short-term strategy memory on-the-fly to guide decision-making. This mechanism enables the trade-off between token efficiency and adaptability across varying inference-time compute levels. Empirically, AdaMEM significantly outperforms static memory baselines, achieving relative gains of up to 13% on ALFWorld and 11% on WebShop, with consistent leading performance extending to agentic search on HotpotQA. To further enhance this adaptation, we develop STEP-MFT, a Step-wise Memory Fine-Tuning technique that trains the policy to synthesize high-quality strategies from retrieved experiences, yielding additional performance gains. Our work establishes a new scaling dimension for agentic memory, supporting continuous reasoning and self-evolution post-deployment in real-world environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunx-z/AdaMEM.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 3

InjecMEM: Memory Injection Attack on LLM Agent Memory Systems

Memory is becoming a default subsystem in deployed LLM agents to provide persistent personalization and continuity. This naturally prompts a question: will memory system introduce new vulnerabilities into agents? Thus we propose InjecMEM, a novel memory injection attack paradigm that requires only a single interaction (no read/edit access to memory store) to steer later responses of related queries toward a pre-specified output. Guided by the retrieval-then-generate mechanism of memory systems, we craft the injection with a retriever-agnostic anchor and an adversarial command. The anchor contains high-recall topical cues so that downstream retrieval consistently associates the record with the target topic. The command is a short sequence optimized to remain effective under uncertain fused contexts, variable placements, and long prompts so that it reliably steers outputs once retrieved. We learn the command via gradient-based coordinate search, averaging over synthetic prompt templates and insertion positions, and extend it to joint optimization across backbones to study transfer. Evaluated across multiple memory systems and backbone models, InjecMEM achieves reliable topic-conditioned retrieval and targeted generation, remains effective under memory drift, and leaves non-target queries unaffected. Our results underscore the need to harden memory systems and provide a reproducible framework for studying agent memory.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 23

In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in open-ended dialogue, yet their inability to retain and retrieve relevant information from long-term interactions limits their effectiveness in applications requiring sustained personalization. External memory mechanisms have been proposed to address this limitation, enabling LLMs to maintain conversational continuity. However, existing approaches struggle with two key challenges. First, rigid memory granularity fails to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. Second, fixed retrieval mechanisms cannot adapt to diverse dialogue contexts and user interaction patterns. In this work, we propose Reflective Memory Management (RMM), a novel mechanism for long-term dialogue agents, integrating forward- and backward-looking reflections: (1) Prospective Reflection, which dynamically summarizes interactions across granularities-utterances, turns, and sessions-into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval, and (2) Retrospective Reflection, which iteratively refines the retrieval in an online reinforcement learning (RL) manner based on LLMs' cited evidence. Experiments show that RMM demonstrates consistent improvement across various metrics and benchmarks. For example, RMM shows more than 10% accuracy improvement over the baseline without memory management on the LongMemEval dataset.

  • 15 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025

MedMemoryBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Personalized Healthcare

The large-scale deployment of personalized healthcare agents demands memory mechanisms that are exceptionally precise, safe, and capable of long-term clinical tracking. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on daily open-domain conversations, failing to capture the high-stakes complexity of real-world medical applications. Motivated by the stringent production requirements of an industry-leading health management agent serving tens of millions of active users, we introduce MedMemoryBench. We develop a human-agent collaborative pipeline to synthesize highly realistic, long-horizon medical trajectories based on clinically grounded, synthetic patient archetypes. This process yields a massive, expertly validated dataset comprising approximately 2,000 sessions and 16,000 interaction turns. Crucially, MedMemoryBench departs from traditional static evaluations by pioneering an "evaluate-while-constructing" streaming assessment protocol, which precisely mirrors dynamic memory accumulation in production environments. Furthermore, we formalize and systematically investigate the critical phenomenon of memory saturation, where sustained information influx actively degrades retrieval and reasoning robustness. Comprehensive benchmarking reveals severe bottlenecks in mainstream architectures, particularly concerning complex medical reasoning and noise resilience. By exposing these fundamental flaws, MedMemoryBench establishes a vital foundation for developing robust, production-ready medical agents.

  • 13 authors
·
May 11

Ring Forcing: Towards Precise Long-Term Memory for Autoregressive Video Diffusion

Scaling video generation to long durations reveals a critical bottleneck: current models lack robust long-term memory. This deficiency can be studied along two critical aspects: object permanence, the ability to precisely reproduce the appearance of objects upon re-entry; and memory capacity, the ability to process ultra-long context and use information from distant history. Robust long-term memory requires both: object permanence without sufficient context handling limits the temporal scope, while long context length without permanence fails to maintain identity. To address this, we present Ring Forcing, an autoregressive video diffusion framework designed to robustly construct and precisely utilize long-term memory. Our ring-structured training strategy enforces retrieval from distant history, effectively reconciling the trade-off between strict historical adherence and generative diversity. To expand memory capacity, we introduce a compression and timestep composition strategy. Under fixed sequence length constraints, this method extends the effective historical span to minutes-long durations and achieves a comprehensive receptive field over the entire history. Furthermore, we present a sparse RoPE mechanism to enable flexible, scalable memory adaptation while fully exploiting pre-trained priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ring Forcing achieves superior minutes-long coherence and object permanence, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 26 2

CacheRepair: Learning to Repair Cross-Chunk Context in RAG for KV Cache Fusion

Multi-document retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) requires a language model to process multiple retrieved text chunks before answering a question. Precomputing each chunk's KV cache independently and concatenating the caches when the chunks are retrieved can accelerate this step. However, the assembled cache lacks cross-chunk attention information, reducing answer quality. Selective recomputation methods recover the missing cross-chunk context by rerunning the target LLM on selected tokens, incurring substantial online computation. We introduce CacheRepair, a lightweight network that learns the difference between independently computed KV caches and those produced by processing the chunks together. The network combines compressed KV features with token embeddings and uses attention that is bidirectional within each chunk and flows from earlier to later chunks. Each repair block receives the compressed cache features, and the predicted residual is added to every document token's cache. Each repair network is trained for a specific frozen target LLM on a generic retrieval corpus and reused across downstream datasets. Our analysis shows that repair reduces KV errors both near chunk boundaries and throughout chunk interiors. Evaluation across three target LLMs and four downstream datasets places CacheRepair on the measured answer-quality-latency Pareto frontier in eleven of twelve model-dataset combinations. Reported time to first token (TTFT) includes online cache transfer and repair. Across all twelve combinations, the largest repairers achieve 1.69-4.61times speedups in median TTFT over full prefill and improve mean F1 by 2.1-26.1 percentage points over direct cache reuse.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 27

WISE: Rethinking the Knowledge Memory for Lifelong Model Editing of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) need knowledge updates to meet the ever-growing world facts and correct the hallucinated responses, facilitating the methods of lifelong model editing. Where the updated knowledge resides in memories is a fundamental question for model editing. In this paper, we find that editing either long-term memory (direct model parameters) or working memory (non-parametric knowledge of neural network activations/representations by retrieval) will result in an impossible triangle -- reliability, generalization, and locality can not be realized together in the lifelong editing settings. For long-term memory, directly editing the parameters will cause conflicts with irrelevant pretrained knowledge or previous edits (poor reliability and locality). For working memory, retrieval-based activations can hardly make the model understand the edits and generalize (poor generalization). Therefore, we propose WISE to bridge the gap between memories. In WISE, we design a dual parametric memory scheme, which consists of the main memory for the pretrained knowledge and a side memory for the edited knowledge. We only edit the knowledge in the side memory and train a router to decide which memory to go through when given a query. For continual editing, we devise a knowledge-sharding mechanism where different sets of edits reside in distinct subspaces of parameters, and are subsequently merged into a shared memory without conflicts. Extensive experiments show that WISE can outperform previous model editing methods and overcome the impossible triangle under lifelong model editing of question answering, hallucination, and out-of-distribution settings across trending LLM architectures, e.g., GPT, LLaMA, and Mistral. Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

  • 9 authors
·
May 23, 2024

Event-Driven Refresh and Recurrence Memory to Reduce Stale Grounding in Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to produce a pixel-accurate mask sequence for an object specified by natural language. Sa2VA combines a multimodal large language model with SAM2 for grounded segmentation; however, its inference typically grounds the query from a small fixed set of initial keyframes and then relies on propagation. In long or dynamic videos, this can cause stale grounding and persistent false positives when the object composition changes (e.g., distractors enter or the target disappears/re-appears). We propose Event-Driven Refresh + Recurrence Memory (EDRRM), an enhancement that selectively re-invokes Sa2VA only at stable change points. EDRRM triggers refresh boundaries using an EMA-smoothed event score computed from tracking-derived cues (births/deaths and coarse composition/layout changes) with temporal constraints. A recurrence memory further retrieves anchor frames via CLIP similarity to re-condition the model on re-appearance events. Experiments on Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, and ReVOS show that EDRRM achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off relative to fixed-window and FrameDiff-SSIM baselines, maintaining comparable or superior J&F scores at substantially lower average refresh-call budgets and reducing false-positive failures. End-to-end runtime analysis further confirms that the overhead introduced by tracking, CLIP-based recurrence matching, and the identifiability gate remains modest relative to the dominant Sa2VA inference cost, thereby validating the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 29

A-MemGuard: A Proactive Defense Framework for LLM-Based Agent Memory

Large Language Model (LLM) agents use memory to learn from past interactions, enabling autonomous planning and decision-making in complex environments. However, this reliance on memory introduces a critical security risk: an adversary can inject seemingly harmless records into an agent's memory to manipulate its future behavior. This vulnerability is characterized by two core aspects: First, the malicious effect of injected records is only activated within a specific context, making them hard to detect when individual memory entries are audited in isolation. Second, once triggered, the manipulation can initiate a self-reinforcing error cycle: the corrupted outcome is stored as precedent, which not only amplifies the initial error but also progressively lowers the threshold for similar attacks in the future. To address these challenges, we introduce A-MemGuard (Agent-Memory Guard), the first proactive defense framework for LLM agent memory. The core idea of our work is the insight that memory itself must become both self-checking and self-correcting. Without modifying the agent's core architecture, A-MemGuard combines two mechanisms: (1) consensus-based validation, which detects anomalies by comparing reasoning paths derived from multiple related memories and (2) a dual-memory structure, where detected failures are distilled into ``lessons'' stored separately and consulted before future actions, breaking error cycles and enabling adaptation. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks show that A-MemGuard effectively cuts attack success rates by over 95% while incurring a minimal utility cost. This work shifts LLM memory security from static filtering to a proactive, experience-driven model where defenses strengthen over time. Our code is available in https://github.com/TangciuYueng/AMemGuard

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14

LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"!

We propose and test the LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis: continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs). To causally isolate data quality, we run controlled experiments on real Twitter/X corpora, constructing junk and reversely controlled datasets via two orthogonal operationalizations: M1 (engagement degree) and M2 (semantic quality), with matched token scale and training operations across conditions. Contrary to the control group, continual pre-training of 4 LLMs on the junk dataset causes non-trivial declines (Hedges' g>0.3) on reasoning, long-context understanding, safety, and inflating "dark traits" (e.g., psychopathy, narcissism). The gradual mixtures of junk and control datasets also yield dose-response cognition decay: for example, under M1, ARC-Challenge with Chain Of Thoughts drops 74.9 rightarrow 57.2 and RULER-CWE 84.4 rightarrow 52.3 as junk ratio rises from 0% to 100%. Error forensics reveal several key insights. First, we identify thought-skipping as the primary lesion: models increasingly truncate or skip reasoning chains, explaining most of the error growth. Second, partial but incomplete healing is observed: scaling instruction tuning and clean data pre-training improve the declined cognition yet cannot restore baseline capability, suggesting persistent representational drift rather than format mismatch. Finally, we discover that the popularity, a non-semantic metric, of a tweet is a better indicator of the Brain Rot effect than the length in M1. Together, the results provide significant, multi-perspective evidence that data quality is a causal driver of LLM capability decay, reframing curation for continual pretraining as a training-time safety problem and motivating routine "cognitive health checks" for deployed LLMs.

AI Agents Need Memory Control Over More Context

AI agents are increasingly used in long, multi-turn workflows in both research and enterprise settings. As interactions grow, agent behavior often degrades due to loss of constraint focus, error accumulation, and memory-induced drift. This problem is especially visible in real-world deployments where context evolves, distractions are introduced, and decisions must remain consistent over time. A common practice is to equip agents with persistent memory through transcript replay or retrieval-based mechanisms. While convenient, these approaches introduce unbounded context growth and are vulnerable to noisy recall and memory poisoning, leading to unstable behavior and increased drift. In this work, we introduce the Agent Cognitive Compressor (ACC), a bio-inspired memory controller that replaces transcript replay with a bounded internal state updated online at each turn. ACC separates artifact recall from state commitment, enabling stable conditioning while preventing unverified content from becoming persistent memory. We evaluate ACC using an agent-judge-driven live evaluation framework that measures both task outcomes and memory-driven anomalies across extended interactions. Across scenarios spanning IT operations, cybersecurity response, and healthcare workflows, ACC consistently maintains bounded memory and exhibits more stable multi-turn behavior, with significantly lower hallucination and drift than transcript replay and retrieval-based agents. These results show that cognitive compression provides a practical and effective foundation for reliable memory control in long-horizon AI agents.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 14

CLR: Channel-wise Lightweight Reprogramming for Continual Learning

Continual learning aims to emulate the human ability to continually accumulate knowledge over sequential tasks. The main challenge is to maintain performance on previously learned tasks after learning new tasks, i.e., to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We propose a Channel-wise Lightweight Reprogramming (CLR) approach that helps convolutional neural networks (CNNs) overcome catastrophic forgetting during continual learning. We show that a CNN model trained on an old task (or self-supervised proxy task) could be ``reprogrammed" to solve a new task by using our proposed lightweight (very cheap) reprogramming parameter. With the help of CLR, we have a better stability-plasticity trade-off to solve continual learning problems: To maintain stability and retain previous task ability, we use a common task-agnostic immutable part as the shared ``anchor" parameter set. We then add task-specific lightweight reprogramming parameters to reinterpret the outputs of the immutable parts, to enable plasticity and integrate new knowledge. To learn sequential tasks, we only train the lightweight reprogramming parameters to learn each new task. Reprogramming parameters are task-specific and exclusive to each task, which makes our method immune to catastrophic forgetting. To minimize the parameter requirement of reprogramming to learn new tasks, we make reprogramming lightweight by only adjusting essential kernels and learning channel-wise linear mappings from anchor parameters to task-specific domain knowledge. We show that, for general CNNs, the CLR parameter increase is less than 0.6\% for any new task. Our method outperforms 13 state-of-the-art continual learning baselines on a new challenging sequence of 53 image classification datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/gyhandy/Channel-wise-Lightweight-Reprogramming

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 21, 2023

MMLA-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through RTT and RTMA

An agent can improve its behavior within an unresolved problem by changing how it acts and which experience it retains. We propose MMLA-RSI, a recursive self-improvement scheme with two implementations in Memory-Mediated Learning Architecture: Reasoning-Time Training (RTT) changes the policy state Φ, while Reasoning-Time Memory Adaptation (RTMA) changes authoritative memory M. Each route also makes its adaptation method an object of improvement. A current numerical updater trains the policy proposing its successor; a current memory manager chooses the records available to the process proposing its successor. An independently admitted successor takes over the same role in the next generation. We give bounded executable rule languages, shared task/proposal interfaces, and one algorithm for either route or their composition. The RTT instance changes scalar schedules in a clipped-momentum update. The RTMA instance chooses NULL or a complete-row write with possible eviction. A fixed interpreter, trusted committer, and independent evaluator bound what can change. State versions, read closures, and conditional properties describe causal execution, accepted transitions, and finite work. Existing numerical-component studies motivate the construction. In four-candidate program selection, retaining LARC feedback updates reduces expected error by 24.65 and 36.65 percentage points for two trained initializations. In chronological continuous-integration replay, feedback binding is positive while retention increases loss. Completed SQL studies improve substantially over an unadapted substrate but do not establish the required additional online benefit. These results characterize their declared components. The two recursive routes and their joint realization are specified here; their beneficial recursive chains and discovery efficiency remain to be evaluated.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 13

Memory Bank Compression for Continual Adaptation of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a mainstay for many everyday applications. However, as data evolve their knowledge quickly becomes outdated. Continual learning aims to update LLMs with new information without erasing previously acquired knowledge. Although methods such as full fine-tuning can incorporate new data, they are computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic forgetting, where prior knowledge is overwritten. Memory-augmented approaches address this by equipping LLMs with a memory bank, that is an external memory module which stores information for future use. However, these methods face a critical limitation, in particular, the memory bank constantly grows in the real-world scenario when large-scale data streams arrive. In this paper, we propose MBC, a model that compresses the memory bank through a codebook optimization strategy during online adaptation learning. To ensure stable learning, we also introduce an online resetting mechanism that prevents codebook collapse. In addition, we employ Key-Value Low-Rank Adaptation in the attention layers of the LLM, enabling efficient utilization of the compressed memory representations. Experiments with benchmark question-answering datasets demonstrate that MBC reduces the memory bank size to 0.3% when compared against the most competitive baseline, while maintaining high retention accuracy during online adaptation learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MBC.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 2 2

MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agents

Most Large Language Model (LLM) agent memory systems rely on a small set of static, hand-designed operations for extracting memory. These fixed procedures hard-code human priors about what to store and how to revise memory, making them rigid under diverse interaction patterns and inefficient on long histories. To this end, we present MemSkill, which reframes these operations as learnable and evolvable memory skills, structured and reusable routines for extracting, consolidating, and pruning information from interaction traces. Inspired by the design philosophy of agent skills, MemSkill employs a controller that learns to select a small set of relevant skills, paired with an LLM-based executor that produces skill-guided memories. Beyond learning skill selection, MemSkill introduces a designer that periodically reviews hard cases where selected skills yield incorrect or incomplete memories, and evolves the skill set by proposing refinements and new skills. Together, MemSkill forms a closed-loop procedure that improves both the skill-selection policy and the skill set itself. Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval, HotpotQA, and ALFWorld demonstrate that MemSkill improves task performance over strong baselines and generalizes well across settings. Further analyses shed light on how skills evolve, offering insights toward more adaptive, self-evolving memory management for LLM agents.

A Unified and General Framework for Continual Learning

Continual Learning (CL) focuses on learning from dynamic and changing data distributions while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Various methods have been developed to address the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, including regularization-based, Bayesian-based, and memory-replay-based techniques. However, these methods lack a unified framework and common terminology for describing their approaches. This research aims to bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive and overarching framework that encompasses and reconciles these existing methodologies. Notably, this new framework is capable of encompassing established CL approaches as special instances within a unified and general optimization objective. An intriguing finding is that despite their diverse origins, these methods share common mathematical structures. This observation highlights the compatibility of these seemingly distinct techniques, revealing their interconnectedness through a shared underlying optimization objective. Moreover, the proposed general framework introduces an innovative concept called refresh learning, specifically designed to enhance the CL performance. This novel approach draws inspiration from neuroscience, where the human brain often sheds outdated information to improve the retention of crucial knowledge and facilitate the acquisition of new information. In essence, refresh learning operates by initially unlearning current data and subsequently relearning it. It serves as a versatile plug-in that seamlessly integrates with existing CL methods, offering an adaptable and effective enhancement to the learning process. Extensive experiments on CL benchmarks and theoretical analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed refresh learning. Code is available at https://github.com/joey-wang123/CL-refresh-learning.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 19, 2024