Jun 2026· 2026 7th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Electromechanical Automation (AIEA)· pp. 1135-1139· 2 citations· 29 references
TL;DR
Structured Experience Compression (SEC), a lightweight method that distills each trajectory into a four-field unit encoding the task type, key decisions, failure reason, and repair action, is proposed, suggesting potential suitability for long-lived deployment settings.
Abstract
Retrieval-augmented experience replay is an emerging approach for the parameter-free adaptation of large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. However, injecting raw multi-step trajectories into the agent's context is costly and risks flooding the prompt with irrelevant details as the experience pool grows. We propose Structured Experience Compression (SEC), a lightweight method that distills each trajectory into a four-field unit encoding the task type $(T)$, key decisions $(D)$, failure reason $(F)$, and repair action $(R)$. At inference time the top- $k$ units closest to the current task are retrieved and appended to the prompt. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that SEC outperforms rawtrajectory retrieval by 7.7 percentage points on ALFWorld and by an absolute reward gain of 0.056 on WebShop, while consuming only 37% of the context tokens. SEC also degrades more gracefully when the pool contains noisy or mismatched records, suggesting potential suitability for long-lived deployment settings.
Long-term memory enables LLM agents to leverage past interactions, but dialogue histories quickly exceed the context window, forcing agents to retrieve relevant subsets at query time. Because useful evidence is sparse and scattered across verbose conversations, retrieval faces a fundamental tension: broadening recall improves coverage but floods downstream reasoning with noise, while compressing memories at write time eases retrieval but irreversibly discards details that future queries may need. We introduce LazyMem, which resolves this tension by deferring all memory construction to query time. Given a retrieved candidate pool, a lightweight model processes it in overlapping parallel windows, selectively retaining and compressing only query-relevant content. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning, using a reward that jointly encourages the identification of relevant messages and the generation of compressions that are faithful to the source and useful for answering the query. On LongMemEval, LazyMem-4B achieves an LLM-judge accuracy of 0.85, outperforming the strongest non-oracle baseline while using only 213 answer-context memory tokens, 21.0 times fewer than the baseline. It further generalizes to LoCoMo without target-domain training and reduces mean latency relative to the prior query-time baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/allacnobug/LazyMem.
Jing Yu, Yibo Zhao, Jiaming Zhang et al.· 1 citation
Agentic retrieval workflows produce query, retrieval, and stopping traces as a byproduct of answering questions. We study how these traces can adapt a deployed dense retriever to changing workflow distributions without new relevance labels, synthetic queries, or LLM judgments. We introduce Navigation-Informed Embeddings (NIE), a family of trace-derived objectives. NIE-Stop turns the stopping document into a soft positive; NIE-Path additionally uses preceding path documents as hard comparisons and imposes ordinal constraints with geometric decay. A BGE encoder adapted from retained source trajectories improves support Recall@20 on an independent target benchmark from 72.2 to 78.0 overall. NIE-Stop reaches 76.9 overall and 52.3 on long paths; NIE-Path raises long-path performance to 55.4, compared with 46.7 for the unadapted encoder. A shuffled-order control under the full path objective loses 3.2 points. Without public-benchmark training, the same adapter also improves nDCG@10 by 1.9 points on standard BEIR HotpotQA. NIE therefore provides a lightweight adaptation channel for settings where trajectories are already retained, with zero incremental labeling cost.
Long-term memory is crucial for personalized responses and long-horizon agent interactions. Existing methods often rely on LLMs to compress or rewrite dialogue histories and use the transformed memories as retrieval evidence. Despite the progress in organizing fragmented contexts, two major drawbacks persist: (1) information loss from compression, which discards fine-grained but later useful details, and (2) semantic drift from rewriting, which erodes the original tone and situated context. In this work, we propose a novel Human-profile Enhanced Retrieval Optimization framework for long-term agent memory (HERO). Specifically, HERO converts the dialogue history into a traceable heterogeneous memory graph that preserves raw dialogue text as evidence for reasoning, thereby mitigating information loss. For retrieval, HERO extracts initial anchors from the current query and incorporates human profiles via an iterative graph traversal; these anchors and profiles provide guidance signals that adaptively activate the most informative regions of the graph. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that HERO outperforms strong baselines on both factual and personalized reasoning, while providing more faithful access to raw dialogue evidence.
Yuanhua Lin, Yile Li, Zhiyuan Zhao et al.· 0 citations
Long-horizon tasks require sustained perception, reasoning, and exploration, and are a persistent challenge for large language model (LLM) agents. This gap is reflected in their limited performance on continual learning benchmarks such as ARC-AGI-3, especially when models are evaluated out of the box. Various agent harnesses have been proposed to close this gap, and each commits to a strategy for handling long sequences of observations, i.e., what information to save from the environment and how to load it into model context, a choice we argue is particularly consequential. Existing methods for context management face a significant tradeoff, as preserving more information makes retrieving relevant details less tractable. We propose PRO-LONG, a minimal context management framework built around programmatic memory for LLM agents in long-horizon, exploratory settings. PRO-LONG addresses the tradeoff by keeping a complete, structured interaction log and capitalizing on recent progress in coding agents to search this history efficiently. On the full ARC-AGI-3 public game set, PRO-LONG improves over a base coding agent by an average of 18.0 percentage points across frontier models, and matches or exceeds state-of-the-art specialized harnesses (up to 76.1% pass@1) while using 4.2-5.8x fewer tokens. With Fable 5, PRO-LONG achieves 97.4% best@2 at a total cost of \$1,750. Relevant code and logs are available at https://github.com/alexisfox7/PRO-LONG.
A. Fox, Junlin Wang, P. Rosu et al.· 2 citations· ⚡1
While Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory for persistent interactions, the retrieval mechanisms governing this memory are rarely treated as evolvable components. This static approach limits performance on heterogeneous memory queries, which often demand diverse evidence construction strategies. To address this, we introduce \textbf{ERSkill}, a retrieval-centric framework for self-evolving, skill-guided memory access. ERSkill compiles interaction histories into a structured memory store and represents retrieval behaviors as executable skills composed of fundamental primitives. At inference time, a trained router dynamically matches each query to the optimal skill to construct tailored evidence for answer generation. To enable continuous improvement, ERSkill co-evolves the skill set and the router during training. It employs an experience trie to efficiently record explored retrieval paths, alongside a double-frontier mechanism that safely decouples the expansion of new skill capabilities from stable, router-facing deployment. Experiments across multiple agent memory benchmarks demonstrate that ERSkill substantially outperforms strong non-evolving and self-evolving baselines. Notably, it improves the overall average across F1, BLEU-1, and LLM-judge scores by 31.3\% with Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct and by 28.1\% with GPT-5.4-nano.
Haolong Chen, Liangyin Zhang, Zhuodan Li et al.· 0 citations
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly use external memory systems to support personalization by drawing on long and evolving interaction histories, in which user preferences may be distributed across time, change with context, and conflict with earlier evidence. However, existing systems face three limitations: fixed-turn, fixed-token, or session-based boundaries can mix unrelated dialogue or split an event from its causes, decisions, and outcomes; storing multiple pieces of user information from the same interaction as a single memory binds together items that serve different functions and should be independently retrievable; and treating the current task as a single top-$k$ retrieval query can return fragments that are individually relevant but fail to jointly capture preference evolution, temporal validity, and contextual applicability. We introduce \textsc{QUMem}, a structured memory framework for query-conditioned user-state inference. \textsc{QUMem} first segments interaction histories into variable-length episodes according to semantic continuity, then decomposes each episode into independently retrievable factual, preference, and transferable insight memories while preserving temporal positions and source evidence. At inference time, three sequential agents identify task-specific information needs, plan multi-query retrieval over the typed memory stores, and jointly infer a temporally and contextually valid user state for downstream response generation. \textsc{QUMem} achieves state-of-the-art performance on both PersonaMem and KnowU-Bench, demonstrating the effectiveness of query-conditioned user-state inference for long-term personalization.
Heng Wang, Yifei Li, Lingling Zhang et al.· 0 citations