# SEDM: Selective Self-Evolving Distributed Memory for Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09498/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02275/) (2017)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06676/) (2016)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06764/) (2019)
- [Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04326/) (2017)
- [Mean Field Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05438/) (2018)
- [RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07367/) (2021)
- [A Human-Inspired Reading Agent with Gist Memory of Very Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09727/) (2024)
- [A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08611/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06052/) (2026)
- [Anatomy of Agentic Memory: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis of Evaluation and System Limitations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19320/) (2026)
- [From Storage to Experience: A Survey on the Evolution of LLM Agent Memory Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06716/) (2026)
- [Self-Improvements in Modern Agentic Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13104/) (2026)
- [AtomMem : Learnable Dynamic Agentic Memory with Atomic Memory Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08323/) (2026)
- [DynaWeb: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning of Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22149/) (2026)
- [The Evolution of Tool Use in LLM Agents: From Single-Tool Call to Multi-Tool Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22862/) (2026)
- [AI Meets Brain: Memory Systems from Cognitive Neuroscience to Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23343/) (2025)
- [Structurally Aligned Subtask-Level Memory for Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21611/) (2026)
- [Memory Reward Inflation in Self-Improving LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00017/) (2026)
- [Self-evolving Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04411/) (2026)
- [Do Agents Dream of False Memories? Black-box Visual Attacks on Long-term Memory in Multimodal AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15657/) (2026)
- [CNMBI: Determining the Number of Clusters Using Center Pairwise Matching and Boundary Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26744/) (2026)
- [MetaEvo: A Meta-Optimization Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07603/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agents in a society can reuse each other's experience, but indiscriminate memory use increases processing cost and can reduce task success. We present SEDM (Selective Self-Evolving Distributed Memory), a framework that selects both what agents share and when recipients use it. On the sender side, SEDM admits memories through paired execution tests, ranks them by relevance and measured utility, and abstracts them for cross-domain reuse. On the recipient side, Calibrated Memory Gating (CMG) predicts success with and without memory in a single forward pass, learning from paired outcomes including ties. It injects memory only when the calibrated success gain outweighs a context-cost penalty. SEDM exceeds the strongest evaluated baseline on LoCoMo open-domain questions by 15.1 F1 points and outperforms G-Memory on FEVER and HotpotQA with 16-32% fewer prompt tokens. In a controlled HotpotQA study, CMG achieves success comparable to always using memory with 18% fewer agent input tokens. Within the full SEDM pipeline on LoCoMo, CMG outperforms both always-use and no-memory policies for two SEDM memories while using 19-31% fewer input tokens than always-use. These results show that selective use can recover value from shared memories that hurt performance when injected indiscriminately.