ByteRover: Agent-Native Memory Through LLM-Curated Hierarchical Context
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
Abstract (arXiv)
Memory-Augmented Generation (MAG) extends large language models with external memory to support long-context reasoning, but existing approaches universally treat memory as an external service that agents call into, delegating storage to separate pipelines of chunking, embedding, and graph extraction. This architectural separation means the system that stores knowledge does not understand it, leading to semantic drift between what the agent intended to remember and what the pipeline actually captured, loss of coordination context across agents, and fragile recovery after failures. In this paper, we propose ByteRover, an agent-native memory architecture that inverts the memory pipeline: the same LLM that reasons about a task also curates, structures, and retrieves knowledge. ByteRover represents knowledge in a hierarchical Context Tree, a file-based knowledge graph organized as Domain, Topic, Subtopic, and Entry, where each entry carries explicit relations, provenance, and an Adaptive Knowledge Lifecycle (AKL) with importance scoring, maturity tiers, and recency decay. Retrieval uses a 5-tier progressive strategy that resolves most queries at sub-100 ms latency without LLM calls, escalating to agentic reasoning only for novel questions. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval demonstrate that ByteRover achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on LoCoMo and competitive results on LongMemEval while requiring zero external infrastructure, no vector database, no graph database, no embedding service, with all knowledge stored as human-readable markdown files on the local filesystem.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.
Builds on
32 of 35 references.
Closest ancestors · 12
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Chronos: Temporal-Aware Conversational Agents with Structured Event Retrieval for Long-Term Memory17 Mar
- 2026Anatomy of Agentic Memory: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis of Evaluation and System Limitations22 Feb
- 2026MAGMA: A Multi-Graph based Agentic Memory Architecture for AI Agents6 Jan
- 2026TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents6 Jan
- 2026SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents5 Jan
- 2025Hindsight is 20/20: Building Agent Memory that Retains, Recalls, and Reflects14 Dec
- 2025What Deserves Memory: Adaptive Memory Distillation for LLM Agents5 Aug
- 2025Memory OS of AI Agent30 May
- 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory28 Apr
- 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents17 Feb
- 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory20 Jan
- 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents27 Feb
Other references · 20
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
- 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
- 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,362
- 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,295
- 2021Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolationcited by 1,085
- 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 656
- 2023MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memorycited by 539
8 more
- 2025From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Modelscited by 223
- 2024LongRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Long-context LLMscited by 104
- 2023RET-LLM: Towards a General Read-Write Memory for Large Language Modelscited by 64
- 2026EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoningcited by 52
- 2024M-RAG: Reinforcing Large Language Model Performance through Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Multiple Partitionscited by 38
- 2025LM2: Large Memory Modelscited by 13
- 2026Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificitycited by 9
- 2026SmartSearch: How Ranking Beats Structure for Conversational Memory Retrievalcited by 5
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Memory is Reconstructed, Not Retrieved: Graph Memory for LLM Agents
- 2026Retrieval as Reasoning: Self-Evolving Agent-Native Retrieval via LLM-Wiki
- 2026AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration
- 2026PlugMem: A Task-Agnostic Plugin Memory Module for LLM Agents
- 2026Memory-Orchestrated Semantic System (MOSS): An Auditable Agentic Memory Architecture
- 2026Memanto: Typed Semantic Memory with Information-Theoretic Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agents
- 2025LiCoMemory: Lightweight and Cognitive Agentic Memory for Efficient Long-Term Reasoning
- 2025Hierarchical Memory for High-Efficiency Long-Term Reasoning in LLM Agents