Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Decentralized Memory
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
Abstract (arXiv)
Self-evolving multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising route to LLM agents that continually improve from experience, with persistent memory at their foundation. However, existing designs almost exclusively adopt a centralized repository shared across agents, incurring communication and coordination overhead, raising privacy concerns, and collapsing agent diversity. We propose DecentMem, a decentralized memory framework in which each agent maintains its own dual-pool memory -- an exploitation pool of consolidated past trajectories and an exploration pool of LLM-generated candidates for unseen contexts. The two pools are reweighted online based on stage-wise feedback from an LLM-as-a-judge. Theoretically, we prove that this design guarantees global reachability of the solution space and achieves O(log T) cumulative regret, matching the stochastic bandit lower bound up to constants. In practice, across three MAS frameworks (AutoGen, DyLAN, AgentNet), three Qwen3 backbones (4B/8B/14B), two Gemma4 backbones (E2B/E4B) and five benchmarks spanning math, code, QA, and embodied tasks, DecentMem improves average accuracy by up to 23.8% over the strongest centralized memory baseline and by up to 52.5% over the no-memory baseline, while reducing token usage by up to 49%.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 23 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.
Builds on
23 of 34 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Multi-Agent Memory from a Computer Architecture Perspective: Visions and Challenges Ahead9 Mar
- 2026SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents5 Jan
- 2025G-Memory: Tracing Hierarchical Memory for Multi-Agent Systems9 Jun
- 2025Collaborative Memory: Multi-User Memory Sharing in LLM Agents with Dynamic Access Control23 May
- 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory28 Apr
- 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents17 Feb
- 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents21 Apr
Other references · 16
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,906
- 2022Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Themcited by 1,767
- 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,761
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,348
- 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
- 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Developmentcited by 893
- 2023AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviorscited by 580
- 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?cited by 559
- 2023MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memorycited by 539
4 more
- 2024AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generationcited by 395
- 2025LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generationcited by 163
- 2025AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemscited by 86
- 2025Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understandingcited by 6
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Multi-Agent Agentic Graph Learning via Structural Signaturescited by 1
- 2026Rosetta Memory: Adaptive Memory for Cross-LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Collaborative Memory for Multi-Agent VLM Systemscited by 0
- 2026DEALS: Decentralized Expertise-Aware Load Serving for Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 0
- 2026Mixture of Self-Improving Branches For Agent Harness Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026Topological Coherence for Self-evolving Multi-agent Systemscited by 0
- 2026Topological Coherence for Self-evolving Multi-agent Systems29 Sep 2026
- 2026Mixture of Self-Improving Branches For Agent Harness Optimization29 Sep 2026
- 2026DEALS: Decentralized Expertise-Aware Load Serving for Multi-Agent LLM Systems27 Sep 2026
- 2026Collaborative Memory for Multi-Agent VLM Systems15 Sep 2026
- 2026Multi-Agent Agentic Graph Learning via Structural Signatures9 Sep 2026
- 2026Rosetta Memory: Adaptive Memory for Cross-LLM Agents5 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026CoMem: Collective-Individual Memory Synergy for Evolutionary Multi-Agent Systems
- 2026FORGE: Self-Evolving Agent Memory With No Weight Updates via Population Broadcast
- 2025MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systems
- 2025SEDM: Scalable Self-Evolving Distributed Memory for Agents
- 2026Sigma-Mem: An Online Reliability Memory for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
- 2026AEL: Evolving Agent Harness in Open-Ended Environments
- 2026CHIME: Credit-Aware Hierarchical Memory Evolution for Long-Horizon Agentic Planning
- 2026Scaling Self-Evolving Agents via Parametric Memory