pith. sign in

hub Canonical reference

A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents

Canonical reference. 92% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

37 Pith papers citing it
Background 92% of classified citations
abstract

Large language model (LLM) based agents have recently attracted much attention from the research and industry communities. Compared with original LLMs, LLM-based agents are featured in their self-evolving capability, which is the basis for solving real-world problems that need long-term and complex agent-environment interactions. The key component to support agent-environment interactions is the memory of the agents. While previous studies have proposed many promising memory mechanisms, they are scattered in different papers, and there lacks a systematical review to summarize and compare these works from a holistic perspective, failing to abstract common and effective designing patterns for inspiring future studies. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive survey on the memory mechanism of LLM-based agents. In specific, we first discuss ''what is'' and ''why do we need'' the memory in LLM-based agents. Then, we systematically review previous studies on how to design and evaluate the memory module. In addition, we also present many agent applications, where the memory module plays an important role. At last, we analyze the limitations of existing work and show important future directions. To keep up with the latest advances in this field, we create a repository at \url{https://github.com/nuster1128/LLM_Agent_Memory_Survey}.

hub tools

citation-role summary

background 10 baseline 1 method 1

citation-polarity summary

representative citing papers

MEME: Multi-entity & Evolving Memory Evaluation

cs.LG · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

All tested LLM memory systems fail at dependency reasoning in multi-entity evolving scenarios, with only an expensive file-based setup showing partial recovery.

AEL: Agent Evolving Learning for Open-Ended Environments

cs.CL · 2026-04-23 · conditional · novelty 7.0

AEL uses a fast-timescale bandit for memory policy selection and slow-timescale LLM reflection for causal insights, achieving a Sharpe ratio of 2.13 on a 208-episode portfolio benchmark while showing that added mechanisms degrade performance.

MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systems

cs.CL · 2025-12-21 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

MemEvolve jointly evolves agent experiential knowledge and memory architectures via a modular codebase, delivering up to 17% gains on agent benchmarks with cross-task and cross-model generalization.

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

cs.AI · 2024-08-15 · conditional · novelty 7.0

Meta Agent Search uses a meta-agent to iteratively program novel agentic systems in code, producing agents that outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed ones across coding, science, and math while transferring across domains and models.

CHAL: Council of Hierarchical Agentic Language

cs.AI · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

CHAL is a multi-agent dialectic system that performs structured belief optimization over defeasible domains using Bayesian-inspired graph representations and configurable meta-cognitive value system hyperparameters.

citing papers explorer

Showing 37 of 37 citing papers.