On the Structural Memory of LLM Agents
Memory plays a pivotal role in enabling large language model~(LLM)-based agents to engage in complex and long-term interactions, such as question answering (QA) and dialogue systems. While various memory modules have been proposed for these tasks, the impact of different memory structures across tasks remains insufficiently explored. This paper investigates how memory structures and memory retrieval methods affect the performance of LLM-based agents. Specifically, we evaluate four types of memory structures, including chunks, knowledge triples, atomic facts, and summaries, along with mixed memory that combines these components. In addition, we evaluate three widely used memory retrieval methods: single-step retrieval, reranking, and iterative retrieval. Extensive experiments conducted across four tasks and six datasets yield the following key insights: (1) Different memory structures offer distinct advantages, enabling them to be tailored to specific tasks; (2) Mixed memory structures demonstrate remarkable resilience in noisy environments; (3) Iterative retrieval consistently outperforms other methods across various scenarios. Our investigation aims to inspire further research into the design of memory systems for LLM-based agents.
Code (1)
Tasks
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelQuestion AnsweringRerankingRetrievalSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
From Untrusted Input to Trusted Memory: A Systematic Study of Memory Poisoning Attacks in LLM Agents
Memory is a core component of AI agents, enabling them to accumulate knowledge across interactions and improve performance. However, persistent memory introduces the risk of memory poisoning, where a single adversarial m…
Structurally Aligned Subtask-Level Memory for Software Engineering Agents
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as autonomous software engineering (SWE) agents. Recent work has further explored augmenting these agents with memory mechanisms to support long-horizo…
Harness the Memory: A Holistic Evaluation of Memory Substrates in Memory Agents
Memory is becoming core infrastructure for long-horizon LLM agents, yet existing evaluations offer limited guidance on which memory substrate, namely the underlying medium in which memory is represented and stored, shoul…
Question AnsweringMemAudit: Post-hoc Auditing of Poisoned Agent Memory via Causal Attribution and Structural Anomaly Detection
Large language model agents increasingly rely on persistent memory to store past interactions, retrieve relevant demonstrations, and improve long-horizon task execution. However, this memory mechanism also creates a prac…
Anomaly DetectionMitigating Provenance-Role Collapse in Long-Term Agents via Typed Memory Representation
Long-term memory is essential for persistent LLM agents, yet prevailing architectures store historical interactions as unstructured, flat text. This unconstrained storage induces provenance-role collapse, a critical fail…
Answer Generation