# Memory Is All You Need: Testing How Model Memory Affects LLM Performance in Annotation Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04874 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04874/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Meta-Rewarding Language Models: Self-Improving Alignment with LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19594/) (2024)
- [Is ChatGPT better than Human Annotators? Potential and Limitations of ChatGPT in Explaining Implicit Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07736/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT-4 Outperforms Experts and Crowd Workers in Annotating Political Twitter Messages with Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06588/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuned 'Small' LLMs (Still) Significantly Outperform Zero-Shot Generative AI Models in Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08660/) (2024)
- [Testing the Reliability of ChatGPT for Text Annotation and Classification: A Cautionary Remark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11085/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT: Beginning of an End of Manual Linguistic Data Annotation? Use Case of Automatic Genre Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03953/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [MemORAI: Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence for LLM Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01386/) (2026)
- [Magic Words or Methodical Work? Challenging Conventional Wisdom in LLM-Based Political Text Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26898/) (2026)
- [Gated Memory: Admission-Controlled Memory Formation for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11270/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation using zero-shot and few-shot learning. Yet these approaches do not allow the model to retain information from previous annotations, making each response independent from the preceding ones. This raises the question of whether model memory -- the LLM having knowledge about its own previous annotations in the same task -- affects performance. In this article, using OpenAI's GPT-4o and Meta's Llama 3.1 on two political science datasets, we demonstrate that allowing the model to retain information about its own previous classifications yields significant performance improvements: between 5 and 25% when compared to zero-shot and few-shot learning. Moreover, memory reinforcement, a novel approach we propose that combines model memory and reinforcement learning, yields additional performance gains in three out of our four tests. These findings have important implications for applied researchers looking to improve performance and efficiency in LLM annotation tasks.