# Adaptive Memory Admission Control for LLM Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04549 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04549/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 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 22 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13501/) (2024)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [ChatDB: Augmenting LLMs with Databases as Their Symbolic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03901/) (2023)
- [Hindsight is 20/20: Building Agent Memory that Retains, Recalls, and Reflects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12818/) (2025)
- [Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15665/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [MemMark: State-Evolution Attribution Watermarking for Agent Long-Term Memory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25002/) (2026)
- [Forget to Improve: On-Device LLM-Agent Continual Learning via Budget-Curated Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25115/) (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)
- [When Agents Remember Too Much: Memory Poisoning Attacks on Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06595/) (2026)
- [ConsistencyGate: Preventing Memory Contamination in LLM Agents via Self-Consistency Admission Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22962/) (2026)
- [AttriMem: Attribution-Guided Process Feedback for Agent Memory Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21106/) (2026)
- [MemRouter: Memory-as-Embedding Routing for Long-Term Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00356/) (2026)
- [Deployment-Time Memorization in Foundation-Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10062/) (2026)
- [When to Forget: A Memory Governance Primitive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12007/) (2026)
- [MMLA: Memory-Mediated Learning Architecture for Predictive Dual-State Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28876/) (2026)
- [CrystalMem: Elastic Memory for Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Knowledge Crystallization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00303/) (2026)
- [When Classic Cache Policies Fail: Learning-Augmented Replacement for Semantic Retrieval Buffers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00394/) (2026)
- [Profile-Graph Memory for LLM Agents: Implicit Cross-Entity Traversal through Narrative Profiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19359/) (2026)
- [Winning by Peeking: Unenforced Budgets and Test-Set Selection Inflate Short-Budget AutoML Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07303/) (2026)
- [A Benchmark and Diagnostic Study of Epistemic Admission in Shared Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30813/) (2026)
- [Ghost in the Context: Policy-Carriage Integrity in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12535/) (2026)
- [ROAM: Robust Organization of Atomic Memories for Agents through Semantic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09778/) (2026)
- [Self-Cleaning and Captured Anyway: One Measured Primitive for Error in a Store an Agent Writes to Itself, and What a Falling Score Actually Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25052/) (2026)
- [AMU:Admission and Memory Update for Personalized Conversations---Structured Memory with SLM Guided Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36976/) (2026)
- [Hallucination Across the Reasoning Lifecycle: Interface Visibility, Causal Evidence, and Release Control in Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05472/) (2026)
- [When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07100/) (2026)
- [What to Admit and How to Present: Governing Persistent Memory in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11188/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM-based agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support multi-session reasoning and interaction, yet current systems provide little control over what information is retained. In practice, agents either accumulate large volumes of conversational content, including hallucinated or obsolete facts, or depend on opaque, fully LLM-driven memory policies that are costly and difficult to audit. As a result, memory admission remains a poorly specified and weakly controlled component in agent architectures. To address this gap, we propose Adaptive Memory Admission Control (A-MAC), a framework that treats memory admission as a structured decision problem. A-MAC decomposes memory value into five complementary and interpretable factors: future utility, factual confidence, semantic novelty, temporal recency, and content type prior. The framework combines lightweight rule-based feature extraction with a single LLM-assisted utility assessment, and learns domain-adaptive admission policies through cross-validated optimization. This design enables transparent and efficient control over long-term memory. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that A-MAC achieves a superior precision-recall tradeoff, improving F1 to 0.583 while reducing latency by 31% compared to state-of-the-art LLM-native memory systems. Ablation results identify content type prior as the most influential factor for reliable memory admission. These findings demonstrate that explicit and interpretable admission control is a critical design principle for scalable and reliable memory in LLM-based agents.