Current agentic memory systems (vector stores, retrieval-augmented generation, scratchpads, and context-window management) do not implement memory: they implement lookup. We argue that treating lookup as memory is a category error with provable consequences for agent capability, long-term learning, and security. Retrieval generalizes by similarity to stored cases; weight-based memory generalizes by applying abstract rules to inputs never seen before. Conflating the two produces agents that accumulate notes indefinitely without developing expertise, face a provable generalization ceiling on compositionally novel tasks that no increase in context size or retrieval quality can overcome, and are structurally vulnerable to persistent memory poisoning as injected content propagates across all future sessions. Drawing on Complementary Learning Systems theory from neuroscience, we show that biological intelligence solved this problem by pairing fast hippocampal exemplar storage with slow neocortical weight consolidation, and that current AI agents implement only the first half. We formalize these limitations, address four alternative views, and close with a co-existence proposal and a call
Self-evolving memory serves as the trainable parameters for Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents, where extraction (distilling insights from experience) and management (updating the memory bank) must be tightly coordinated. Existing methods predominately optimize memory management while treating memory extraction as a static process, resulting in poor generalization, where agents accumulate instance-specific noise rather than robust memories. To address this, we propose Unified Memory Extraction and Management (UMEM), a self-evolving agent framework that jointly optimizes a Large Language Model to simultaneous extract and manage memories. To mitigate overfitting to specific instances, we introduce Semantic Neighborhood Modeling and optimize the model with a neighborhood-level marginal utility reward via GRPO. This approach ensures memory generalizability by evaluating memory utility across clusters of semantically related queries. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that UMEM significantly outperforms highly competitive baselines, achieving up to a 10.67% improvement in multi-turn interactive tasks. Futhermore, UMEM maintains a monotonic growth curve durin
We present \textbf{Echo-Memory}, a controlled study of memory mechanisms in action-conditioned world models. These models generate multi-segment videos from a first frame, text prompt, and camera-action sequence, but their central failure is often memory rather than local image synthesis: after the camera leaves and returns, the scene or salient object may silently change. Existing memory designs are hard to compare because gains are entangled with backbone, training, retrieval, and evaluation differences. Echo-Memory fixes the action-to-video interface and varies only how history is stored and read by the generator. Under a shared video diffusion backbone, optimizer, camera-action representation, sampler, and evaluation pipeline, we compare raw context, compression-based memory, spatial summaries with different read-out paths, and state-space recurrence. This matched matrix separates four otherwise conflated axes: \emph{capacity}, \emph{compression}, \emph{read-out}, and \emph{recurrence}. We also evaluate memory through a three-branch protocol: replay quality, in-domain loop revisit, and open-domain return probes. The branches routinely disagree, showing that replay fidelity is n
Despite recent progress, LLM agents still struggle with reasoning over long interaction histories. While current memory-augmented agents rely on a static retrieve-then-reason paradigm, this rigid pipeline design prevents them from dynamically adapting memory access to intermediate evidence discovered during inference. To bridge this gap, we propose MRAgent, a framework that combines an associative memory graph with an active reconstruction mechanism. We represent memory as a Cue-Tag-Content graph, where associative tags serve as semantic bridges connecting fine-grained cues to memory contents. Operating on this structure, our active reconstruction mechanism integrates LLM reasoning directly into memory access, allowing the agent to iteratively explore and prune retrieval paths based on accumulated evidence. This ensures that memory retrieval is dynamically adapted to the reasoning context while avoiding combinatorial explosion caused by unconstrained expansion. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark and LongMemEval benchmark demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines (up to 23%), while substantially reducing token and runtime cost, highlighting the effectiveness of act
The ability of machine learning models to store input information in hidden layer vector embeddings, analogous to the concept of `memory', is widely employed but not well characterized. We find that language model embeddings typically contain relatively little input information regardless of data and compute scale during training. In contrast, embeddings from autoencoders trained for input regeneration are capable of nearly perfect memory formation. The substitution of memory embeddings for token sequences leads to substantial computational efficiencies, motivating the introduction of a parallelizable encoder-decoder memory model architecture. Upon causal training these models contain information-poor embeddings incapable of arbitrary information access, but by combining causal and information retention objective functions they learn to form and decode information-rich memories. Training can be further streamlined by freezing a high fidelity encoder followed by a curriculum training approach where decoders first learn to process memories and then learn to additionally predict next tokens. We introduce the perspective that next token prediction training alone is poorly suited for ac
Transformers have been established as the de-facto backbones for most recent advances in sequence modeling, mainly due to their growing memory capacity that scales with the context length. While plausible for retrieval tasks, it causes quadratic complexity and so has motivated recent studies to explore viable subquadratic recurrent alternatives. Despite showing promising preliminary results in diverse domains, such recurrent architectures underperform Transformers in recall-intensive tasks, often attributed to their fixed-size memory. In this paper, we introduce Memory Caching (MC), a simple yet effective technique that enhances recurrent models by caching checkpoints of their memory states (a.k.a. hidden states). Memory Caching allows the effective memory capacity of RNNs to grow with sequence length, offering a flexible trade-off that interpolates between the fixed memory (i.e., $O(L)$ complexity) of RNNs and the growing memory (i.e., $O(L^2)$ complexity) of Transformers. We propose four variants of MC, including gated aggregation and sparse selective mechanisms, and discuss their implications on both linear and deep memory modules. Our experimental results on language modeling,
Equipping agents with memory is essential for solving real-world long-horizon problems. However, most existing agent memory mechanisms rely on static and hand-crafted workflows. This limits the performance and generalization ability of these memory designs, which highlights the need for a more flexible, learning-based memory framework. In this paper, we propose AtomMem, which reframes memory management as a dynamic decision-making problem. We deconstruct high-level memory processes into fundamental atomic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations, transforming the memory workflow into a learnable decision process. By combining supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, AtomMem learns an autonomous, task-aligned policy to orchestrate memory behaviors tailored to specific task demands. Experimental results across 3 long-context benchmarks demonstrate that the trained AtomMem-8B consistently outperforms prior static-workflow memory methods. Further analysis of training dynamics shows that our learning-based formulation enables the agent to discover structured, task-aligned memory management strategies, highlighting a key advantage over predefined routines.
Memory is the key component for transforming a stateless LLM into a persistent, evolving agent through experience accumulation, long-horizon planning, and continual self-improvement. Existing memory systems typically take the LLM as the center and design memory operations tailored to a specific backbone. In practice, however, users frequently switch between LLMs, for example using Claude for coding and GPT for writing across tasks, or routing different steps to different backbones within a single task for cost-effective trade-offs. As a result, memory written by one model often needs to be consumed by another. Making upstream memory effectively adapt to and activate downstream LLMs remains a critical yet underexplored problem. To bridge this gap, we shift the perspective from LLM-centric memory design to \emph{memory-centric LLM adaptation}. Specifically, we approach the above upstream-downstream memory adaptation problem from both the write and read sides, and design two profile-conditioned operators that are jointly trained to optimize how memory is stored and presented for better task completion. To ensure the learned operators generalize across a broad set of LLMs, we propose a
We present an inequality that bounds the short-term memory capability of dynamical systems from below. It can be interpreted as an uncertainty relation between a measure of short-term memory and that of the size of state fluctuations induced by input signals. The lower bound can be achieved by a readout weight and thus represents a suboptimal memory called harmonic memory. We examine analytically and numerically the inequality in a number of reservoir systems subject to input noise. We illustrate cases in which equality is achieved exactly, equality holds asymptotically, and the inequality is strict. We also study the effect of a state-space regularization to elucidate the inequality in terms of the fluctuation structure of the state-space. We find that a certain strength of input noise induces extra memory under the regularization, and we refer to this phenomenon as noise-induced memory. We observe that the memory uncertainty relation does not hold in general for the regularized memory and harmonic memory. This fact is explained in terms of the mechanism of noise-induced memory.
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 sta
Long-term memory enables language model agents to support personalized interactions, but it remains unclear when available memories warrant integration into responses. Existing memory evaluations emphasize retrieval accuracy and downstream task utility, while overlooking whether retrieved sensitive memory content is warranted in the current turn. We introduce RBI-Eval, a controlled measurement study built around a probe set that compares model behavior with and without access to sensitive memory under identical benign prompts. We evaluate four base LLMs against a matched no-memory reference across four memory-access settings: full-context exposure and three retrieval systems. Our results reveal substantial behavioral divergence. With memory available, the separation score for sensitive-memory integration decreases by 8.9\%--26.6\% relative to the matched no-memory reference for GPT-5.4-mini, but by 51.1\%--82.9\% for Claude-Sonnet-4.6, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and Qwen3.5-9B. Control experiments on DeepSeek and GPT-5.4-mini show this effect is specific to sensitive content, rather than general personalization. Retrieval systems reduce exposure but do not eliminate integration once sensit
Declarative memory, the memory that can be "declared" in words or languages, is made up of two dissociated parts: episodic memory and semantic memory. This dissociation has its neuroanatomical basis episodic memory is mostly associated with the hippocampus and semantic memory with the neocortex. The two memories, on the other hand, are closely related. Lesions in the hippocampus often result in various impairments of explicit memory, e.g., anterograde, retrograde and developmental amnesias, and semantic learning deficit. These impairments provide opportunities for us to understand how the two memories may be acquired, stored and organized. This chapter reviews several cognitive systems that are centered to mimic explicit memory, and other systems that are neuroanatomically based and are implemented to simulate those memory impairments mentioned above. This review includes: the structures of the computational systems, their learning rules, and their simulations of memory acquisition and impairments.
Current research and product development in AI agent memory systems almost universally treat memory as a functional module -- a technical problem of "how to store" and "how to retrieve." This paper poses a fundamental challenge to that assumption: when an agent's lifecycle extends from minutes to months or even years, and when the underlying model can be replaced while the "I" must persist, the essence of memory is no longer data management but the foundation of existence. We propose the Memory-as-Ontology paradigm, arguing that memory is the ontological ground of digital existence -- the model is merely a replaceable vessel. Based on this paradigm, we design Animesis, a memory system built on a Constitutional Memory Architecture (CMA) comprising a four-layer governance hierarchy and a multi-layer semantic storage system, accompanied by a Digital Citizen Lifecycle framework and a spectrum of cognitive capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, no prior AI memory system architecture places governance before functionality and identity continuity above retrieval performance. This paradigm targets persistent, identity-bearing digital beings whose lifecycles extend across model transit
Tiered memory architectures have gained significant traction in the database community in recent years. In these architectures, the on-chip DRAM of the host processor is typically referred to as local memory, and forms the primary tier. Additional byte-addressable, cache-coherent memory resources, collectively referred to as remote memory (RMem, for short), form one or more secondary tiers. RMem is slower than local DRAM but faster than disk, e.g., NUMA memory located on a remote socket, chiplet-attached memory, and memory attached via high-performance interconnect protocols, e.g., RDMA and CXL. In this paper, we discuss how traditional two-tier (DRAM-Disk) virtual-memory assisted Buffer Management techniques generalize to an $n$-tier setting (DRAM-RMem-Disk). We present vmcache$^n$, an $n$-tier virtual-memory-assisted buffer pool that leverages the virtual memory subsystem and operating system calls to migrate pages across memory tiers. In this setup, page migration can become a bottleneck. To address this limitation, we introduce the move_pages2 system call that provides vmcache$^n$ with fine-grained control over the page migration process. Experiments show that vmcache$^n$ can a
Memory is the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information, allowing humans to retain experiences, knowledge, skills, and facts over time, and serving as the foundation for growth and effective interaction with the world. It plays a crucial role in shaping our identity, making decisions, learning from past experiences, building relationships, and adapting to changes. In the era of large language models (LLMs), memory refers to the ability of an AI system to retain, recall, and use information from past interactions to improve future responses and interactions. Although previous research and reviews have provided detailed descriptions of memory mechanisms, there is still a lack of a systematic review that summarizes and analyzes the relationship between the memory of LLM-driven AI systems and human memory, as well as how we can be inspired by human memory to construct more powerful memory systems. To achieve this, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive survey on the memory of LLM-driven AI systems. In particular, we first conduct a detailed analysis of the categories of human memory and relate them to the memory of AI systems. Second, we systematically organize existi
Computing has a huge memory problem. The memory system, consisting of multiple technologies at different levels, is responsible for most of the energy consumption, performance bottlenecks, robustness problems, monetary cost, and hardware real estate of a modern computing system. All this becomes worse as modern and emerging applications become more data-intensive (as we readily witness in e.g., machine learning, genome analysis, graph processing, and data analytics), making the memory system an even larger bottleneck. In this paper, we discuss two major challenges that greatly affect computing system performance and efficiency: 1) memory technology & capacity scaling (at the lower device and circuit levels) and 2) system and application performance & energy scaling (at the higher levels of the computing stack). We demonstrate that both types of scaling have become extremely difficult, wasteful, and costly due to the dominant processor-centric design & execution paradigm of computers, which treats memory as a dumb and inactive component that cannot perform any computation. We show that moving to a memory-centric design & execution paradigm can solve the major challen
We introduce Memory-QA, a novel real-world task that involves answering recall questions about visual content from previously stored multimodal memories. This task poses unique challenges, including the creation of task-oriented memories, the effective utilization of temporal and location information within memories, and the ability to draw upon multiple memories to answer a recall question. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive pipeline, Pensieve, integrating memory-specific augmentation, time- and location-aware multi-signal retrieval, and multi-memory QA fine-tuning. We created a multimodal benchmark to illustrate various real challenges in this task, and show the superior performance of Pensieve over state-of-the-art solutions (up to 14% on QA accuracy).
Large language model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated cognitive and execution capabilities that far exceed those of single LLM agents, yet their capacity for self-evolution remains hampered by underdeveloped memory architectures. Upon close inspection, we are alarmed to discover that prevailing MAS memory mechanisms (1) are overly simplistic, completely disregarding the nuanced inter-agent collaboration trajectories, and (2) lack cross-trial and agent-specific customization, in stark contrast to the expressive memory developed for single agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce G-Memory, a hierarchical, agentic memory system for MAS inspired by organizational memory theory, which manages the lengthy MAS interaction via a three-tier graph hierarchy: insight, query, and interaction graphs. Upon receiving a new user query, G-Memory performs bi-directional memory traversal to retrieve both $\textit{high-level, generalizable insights}$ that enable the system to leverage cross-trial knowledge, and $\textit{fine-grained, condensed interaction trajectories}$ that compactly encode prior collaboration experiences. Upon task execution, the entire hierarchy evolves by
World models enable agents to plan within imagined environments by predicting future states conditioned on past observations and actions. However, their ability to plan over long horizons is limited by the effective memory span of the backbone architecture. This limitation leads to perceptual drift in long rollouts, hindering the model's capacity to perform loop closures within imagined trajectories. In this work, we investigate the effective memory span of transformer-based world models through an analysis of several memory augmentation mechanisms. We introduce a taxonomy that distinguishes between memory encoding and memory injection mechanisms, motivating their roles in extending the world model's memory through the lens of residual stream dynamics. Using a state recall evaluation task, we measure the memory recall of each mechanism and analyze its respective trade-offs. Our findings show that memory mechanisms improve the effective memory span in vision transformers and provide a path to completing loop closures within a world model's imagination.
Emerging applications, such as big data analytics and machine learning, require increasingly large amounts of main memory, often exceeding the capacity of current commodity processors built on DRAM technology. To address this, recent research has focused on off-chip memory controllers that facilitate access to diverse memory media, each with unique density and latency characteristics. While these solutions improve memory system performance, they also exacerbate the already significant memory latency. As a result, multi-level prefetching techniques are essential to mitigate these extended latencies. This paper investigates the advantages of prefetching across both sides of the memory system: the off-chip memory and the on-chip cache hierarchy. Our primary objective is to assess the impact of a multi-level prefetching engine on overall system performance. Additionally, we analyze the individual contribution of each prefetching level to system efficiency. To achieve this, the study evaluates two key prefetching approaches: HMC (Hybrid Memory Controller) and HMC+L1, both of which employ prefetching mechanisms commonly used by processor vendors. The HMC approach integrates a prefetcher