# Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01885/

## Key facts

- Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 29 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03768/) (2020)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13501/) (2024)
- [Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13956/) (2025)
- [ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13958/) (2025)
- [AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-turn LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13178/) (2024)
- [ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07540/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Memory in LLM Agents via Incremental Multi-Turn Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05257/) (2025)
- [BabyAI: A Platform to Study the Sample Efficiency of Grounded Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08272/) (2018)
- [Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19828/) (2025)
- [MIRIX: Multi-Agent Memory System for LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07957/) (2025)
- [From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15965/) (2025)
- [Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05925/) (2024)
- [Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06821/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00083/) (2025)
- [On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05589/) (2025)
- [How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16067/) (2025)
- [RLHF Deciphered: A Critical Analysis of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08555/) (2024)
- [MemInsight: Autonomous Memory Augmentation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21760/) (2025)
- [RAP: Retrieval-Augmented Planning with Contextual Memory for Multimodal LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03610/) (2024)
- [Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12635/) (2025)
- [MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00332/) (2024)
- [KARMA: Augmenting Embodied AI Agents with Long-and-short Term Memory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14908/) (2024)
- [Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15665/) (2024)
- [What Should We Engineer in Prompts? Training Humans in Requirement-Driven LLM Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08775/) (2024)
- [The Effect of State Representation on LLM Agent Behavior in Dynamic Routing Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15624/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents:Mechanisms, Evaluation, and Emerging Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07670/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [Supersede: Diagnosing and Training the Memory-Update Gap in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27472/) (2026)
- [EvolveMem:Self-Evolving Memory Architecture via AutoResearch for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13941/) (2026)
- [Belief Memory: Agent Memory Under Partial Observability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05583/) (2026)
- [MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18652/) (2026)
- [Graph-Native Cognitive Memory for AI Agents: Formal Belief Revision Semantics for Versioned Memory Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17244/) (2026)
- [Forget to Improve: On-Device LLM-Agent Continual Learning via Budget-Curated Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25115/) (2026)
- [Towards Multimodal Lifelong Understanding: A Dataset and Agentic Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05484/) (2026)
- [SoK: Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Taxonomy, Architectures, Evaluation, and Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07379/) (2026)
- [Retrieval-Augmented LLM Agents: Learning to Learn from Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18272/) (2026)
- [Memory Intelligence Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04503/) (2026)
- [Remember the Decision, Not the Description: A Rate-Distortion Framework for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10870/) (2026)
- [Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08755/) (2026)
- [AdaMEM: Test-Time Adaptive Memory for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05684/) (2026)
- [Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15390/) (2026)
- [RaMem: Contextual Reinstatement for Long-term Agentic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22844/) (2026)
- [TRUSTMEM: Learning Trustworthy Memory Consolidation for LLM Agents with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25161/) (2026)
- [Procedural Memory Distillation: Online Reflection for Self-Improving Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01480/) (2026)
- [Toward a Theory of Hierarchical Memory for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21564/) (2026)
- [AutoMem: Automated Learning of Memory as a Cognitive Skill](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01224/) (2026)
- [GrandCode: Achieving Grandmaster Level in Competitive Programming via Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02721/) (2026)
- [MemRouter: Memory-as-Embedding Routing for Long-Term Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00356/) (2026)
- [DynamicMem: A Long-Horizon Memory Benchmark in Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22877/) (2026)
- [GAAMA: Graph Augmented Associative Memory for Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27910/) (2026)
- [Learning When to Remember: Risk-Sensitive Contextual Bandits for Abstention-Aware Memory Retrieval in LLM-Based Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27283/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Pareto-Efficient Retrieval over Intent-Aware Structured Memory for Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12260/) (2026)
- [Mem-π: Adaptive Memory through Learning When and What to Generate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21463/) (2026)
- [LLM Agents Are Latent Context Managers: Eliciting Self-Managed Context via State Proprioception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30005/) (2026)
- [Speculate with Memory: Lossless Acceleration for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12236/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents face fundamental limitations in long-horizon reasoning due to finite context windows, making effective memory management critical. Existing methods typically handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose Agentic Memory (AgeMem), a unified framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy. AgeMem exposes memory operations as tool-based actions, enabling the LLM agent to autonomously decide what and when to store, retrieve, update, summarize, or discard information. To train such unified behaviors, we propose a three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy and design a step-wise GRPO to address sparse and discontinuous rewards induced by memory operations. Experiments on five long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate that AgeMem consistently outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines across multiple LLM backbones, achieving improved task performance, higher-quality long-term memory, and more efficient context usage.