Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents:Mechanisms, Evaluation, and Emerging Frontiers

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07670v1
• Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:08:01 GMT
• Title: Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents:Mechanisms, Evaluation, and Emerging Frontiers
• Abstract summary: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in settings where a single context window is too small to capture what has happened.<n>Memory is what turns a stateless text generator into a genuinely adaptive agent.<n>This survey offers a structured account of how memory is designed, implemented, and evaluated in modern LLM-based agents.
• Score: 0.42061757959666934
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in settings where a single context window is far too small to capture what has happened, what was learned, and what should not be repeated. Memory -- the ability to persist, organize, and selectively recall information across interactions -- is what turns a stateless text generator into a genuinely adaptive agent. This survey offers a structured account of how memory is designed, implemented, and evaluated in modern LLM-based agents, covering work from 2022 through early 2026. We formalize agent memory as a \emph{write--manage--read} loop tightly coupled with perception and action, then introduce a three-dimensional taxonomy spanning temporal scope, representational substrate, and control policy. Five mechanism families are examined in depth: context-resident compression, retrieval-augmented stores, reflective self-improvement, hierarchical virtual context, and policy-learned management. On the evaluation side, we trace the shift from static recall benchmarks to multi-session agentic tests that interleave memory with decision-making, analyzing four recent benchmarks that expose stubborn gaps in current systems. We also survey applications where memory is the differentiating factor -- personal assistants, coding agents, open-world games, scientific reasoning, and multi-agent teamwork -- and address the engineering realities of write-path filtering, contradiction handling, latency budgets, and privacy governance. The paper closes with open challenges: continual consolidation, causally grounded retrieval, trustworthy reflection, learned forgetting, and multimodal embodied memory.

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