HiAgent: Hierarchical Working Memory Management for Solving Long-Horizon Agent Tasks with Large Language Model
read the original abstract
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents exhibit significant potential across various domains, operating as interactive systems that process environmental observations to generate executable actions for target tasks. The effectiveness of these agents is significantly influenced by their memory mechanism, which records historical experiences as sequences of action-observation pairs. We categorize memory into two types: cross-trial memory, accumulated across multiple attempts, and in-trial memory (working memory), accumulated within a single attempt. While considerable research has optimized performance through cross-trial memory, the enhancement of agent performance through improved working memory utilization remains underexplored. Instead, existing approaches often involve directly inputting entire historical action-observation pairs into LLMs, leading to redundancy in long-horizon tasks. Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, this paper introduces HiAgent, a framework that leverages subgoals as memory chunks to manage the working memory of LLM-based agents hierarchically. Specifically, HiAgent prompts LLMs to formulate subgoals before generating executable actions and enables LLMs to decide proactively to replace previous subgoals with summarized observations, retaining only the action-observation pairs relevant to the current subgoal. Experimental results across five long-horizon tasks demonstrate that HiAgent achieves a twofold increase in success rate and reduces the average number of steps required by 3.8. Additionally, our analysis shows that HiAgent consistently improves performance across various steps, highlighting its robustness and generalizability. Project Page: https://github.com/HiAgent2024/HiAgent .
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 11 Pith papers
-
Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost
Post-Reasoning boosts LLM accuracy by reversing the usual answer-after-reasoning order, delivering mean relative gains of 17.37% across 117 model-benchmark pairs with zero extra cost.
-
ECHO: Prune to act, trace to learn with selective turn memory in agentic RL
ECHO is a selective turn-memory framework for agentic RL that compresses turns into indexed records, selects them for bounded contexts, and uses source indices to assign outcome credit to supporting evidence, reaching...
-
Mem-$\pi$: Adaptive Memory through Learning When and What to Generate
Mem-π is a framework using a dedicated model and decision-content decoupled RL to generate context-specific guidance on demand for LLM agents, outperforming retrieval baselines by over 30% on web navigation.
-
Hierarchical Visual Agent: Managing Contexts in Joint Image-Text Space for Advanced Chart Reasoning
HierVA improves multi-step chart question answering by having a high-level manager maintain key joint contexts while specialized workers perform targeted reasoning with visual zoom-in.
-
RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation
RoboTwin 2.0 automates diverse synthetic data creation for dual-arm robots via MLLMs and five-axis domain randomization, leading to 228-367% gains in manipulation success.
-
PyraVid: Hierarchical Multimodal Memory for Long-Horizon Video Reasoning
PyraVid is a hierarchical multimodal memory system that structures long videos into pyramids to improve long-horizon reasoning and evidence aggregation.
-
Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models
A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.
-
Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models
The paper unifies perspectives on Long CoT in reasoning LLMs by introducing a taxonomy, detailing characteristics of deep reasoning and reflection, and discussing emergence phenomena and future directions.
-
Agentic AI Security: Threats, Defenses, Evaluation, and Open Challenges
A survey that taxonomizes threats to agentic AI, reviews benchmarks and evaluation methods, discusses technical and governance defenses, and identifies open challenges.
-
Context Recycling for Long-Horizon LLM Inference
ContextForge recycles context in long-horizon LLM tasks via query generation, memory retrieval, and synthesis, yielding reduced token use and improved consistency on a 15-turn healthcare benchmark while preserving accuracy.
-
Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems
This survey frames foundation agents using brain-inspired modular architectures and reviews challenges in evolution, collaboration, and safety.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.