# MemCoT: Test-Time Scaling through Memory-Driven Chain-of-Thought

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08216 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08216/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 11 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18234/) (2025)
- [G-Memory: Tracing Hierarchical Memory for Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07398/) (2025)
- [What Deserves Memory: Adaptive Memory Distillation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03341/) (2025)
- [A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17208/) (2025)
- [Memory Matters More: Event-Centric Memory as a Logic Map for Agent Searching and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04726/) (2026)
- [InfMem: Learning System-2 Memory Control for Long-Context Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02704/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Long-Term Memory for Long-Context Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23730/) (2025)
- [Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4o(mni) Native Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05501/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FSFM: A Biologically-Inspired Framework for Selective Forgetting of Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20300/) (2026)
- [TransMem: Transforming Hidden States into Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29032/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) still suffer from severe hallucinations and catastrophic forgetting during causal reasoning over massive, fragmented long contexts. Existing memory mechanisms typically treat retrieval as a static, single-step passive matching process, leading to severe semantic dilution and contextual fragmentation. To overcome these fundamental bottlenecks, we propose MemCoT, a test-time memory scaling framework that redefines the reasoning process by transforming long-context reasoning into an iterative, stateful information search. MemCoT introduces a multi-view long-term memory perception module that enables Zoom-In evidence localization and Zoom-Out contextual expansion, allowing the model to first identify where relevant evidence resides and then reconstruct the surrounding causal structure necessary for reasoning. In addition, MemCoT employs a task-conditioned dual short-term memory system composed of semantic state memory and episodic trajectory memory. This short-term memory records historical search decisions and dynamically guides query decomposition and pruning across iterations. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MemCoT establishes a state-of-the-art performance. Empowered by MemCoT, several open- and closed-source models achieve SOTA performance on the LoCoMo benchmark and LongMemEval-S benchmark.