# AdaMem: Learning What to Remember with Adaptive Memory Policies for Personalized Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21144/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 18 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [What Deserves Memory: Adaptive Memory Distillation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03341/) (2025)
- [Crafting Personalized Agents through Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Editable Memory Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19401/) (2024)
- [From Recall to Forgetting: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for Personalized Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20006/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Long-Horizon Memory for Multi-Party Collaborative Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01313/) (2026)
- [Preference-Aware Memory Update for Long-Term LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09720/) (2025)
- [EvolveMem:Self-Evolving Memory Architecture via AutoResearch for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13941/) (2026)
- [PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06254/) (2025)
- [Evoking User Memory: Personalizing LLM via Recollection-Familiarity Adaptive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09250/) (2026)
- [MemORAI: Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence for LLM Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01386/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Affective Memory Management for Personalized LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27418/) (2025)

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

- [Do Personalized Skills Help Coding Agents? An Empirical Study of Developer Interaction Histories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10319/) (2026)
- [MemCodex: Self-Programming Hierarchical Memory for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39765/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term memory systems allow LLM agents to preserve information beyond a single context window, but most systems focus on storing and retrieving facts after extraction, leaving the write decision under-specified. What deserves memory can depend on the user's current task, topic, activity, or interaction partner, while uniform extraction applies one notion of importance across these different situations. We formulate this challenge as preference-conditioned write control and introduce AdaMem, which uses adaptive natural-language Memory Policies to personalize what an agent writes to memory. Each policy represents the user's memory preference for a particular interaction context, is updated from periodic feedback, and controls subsequent memory writing. We evaluate this loop in AdaMem-Bench, which assigns different memory preferences to six concurrent interaction personas across five ten-week stories. Across two extraction models and two feedback modes, AdaMem improves average QA accuracy over Mem0 from 80.0% to 84.35% while reducing persistent memory by 9.27%. Our analyses show that explicit feedback helps models learn better memory policies, but current models still struggle to translate those policies into reliably selective writing behavior. AdaMem thus demonstrates the promise of adaptive write control while exposing policy execution as a central limitation of current memory agents. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/galaxyChen/AdaMem