mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MemSyco-Bench: Benchmarking Sycophancy in Agent Memory

arXiv 2607.01071 ↗First posted 1 Jul 2026cs.IR cs.AIcited by 12

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems

Abstract (arXiv)

Memory has emerged as a cornerstone of modern LLM-based agents, supporting their evolution from single-turn assistants to long-term collaborators. However, memory is not always beneficial: retrieved memories often induce a critical issue of sycophancy, causing agents to over-align with the user at the cost of factual accuracy or objective reasoning. Despite this emerging risk, existing memory benchmarks primarily evaluate whether memories are correctly stored, retrieved, or updated, while overlooking how retrieved memories influence downstream reasoning and decision-making. To bridge this gap, we propose MemSyco-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating memory-induced sycophancy in agent systems. MemSyco-Bench measures when memory should influence a decision and how valid memory should be used. Specifically, it covers five tasks that assess whether agents can reject memory as factual evidence, respect its applicable scope, resolve conflicts between memory and objective evidence, track memory updates, and use valid memory for personalization. All related resources are collected for the community at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/MemSyco-Bench.

Key facts. Cited by 12 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 54 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2026.

Builds on

54 of 61 references.

Closest ancestors · 18

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026STALE: Can LLM Agents Know When Their Memories Are No Longer Valid?7 May
  2. 2026MemoryArena: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Interdependent Multi-Session Agentic Tasks18 Feb
  3. 2026Graph-based Agent Memory: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applications5 Feb
  4. 2026OP-Bench: Benchmarking Over-Personalization for Memory-Augmented Personalized Conversational Agents20 Jan
  5. 2026TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents6 Jan
  6. 2025Memory in the Age of AI Agents15 Dec
  7. 2025PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memory7 Dec
  8. 2025Enabling Personalized Long-term Interactions in LLM-based Agents through Persistent Memory and User Profiles9 Oct
  9. 2025MIRIX: Multi-Agent Memory System for LLM-Based Agents10 Jul
  10. 2025G-Memory: Tracing Hierarchical Memory for Multi-Agent Systems9 Jun
  11. 2025Memory OS of AI Agent30 May
  12. 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory28 Apr
6 more
  1. 2025In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents11 Mar
  2. 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents17 Feb
  3. 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory20 Jan
  4. 2024Crafting Personalized Agents through Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Editable Memory Graphs28 Sep
  5. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents21 Apr
  6. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents27 Feb

Other references · 36

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  2. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  3. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,297
  4. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  5. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
  6. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
  7. 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,389
  8. 2023Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Modelscited by 1,040
  9. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
  10. 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 707
  11. 2024LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitaskscited by 379
  12. 2023Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language modelscited by 187
24 more
  1. 2025LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generationcited by 180
  2. 2024Sycophancy to Subterfuge: Investigating Reward-Tampering in Large Language Modelscited by 178
  3. 2025Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scalecited by 178
  4. 2025SycEval: Evaluating LLM Sycophancycited by 108
  5. 2025Measuring Sycophancy of Language Models in Multi-turn Dialoguescited by 104
  6. 2024Sycophancy in Large Language Models: Causes and Mitigationscited by 101
  7. 2023When Large Language Models contradict humans? Large Language Models' Sycophantic Behaviourcited by 62
  8. 2025MemoryBench: A Benchmark for Memory and Continual Learning in LLM Systemscited by 61
  9. 2024From Yes-Men to Truth-Tellers: Addressing Sycophancy in Large Language Models with Pinpoint Tuningcited by 54
  10. 2025When Truth Is Overridden: Uncovering the Internal Origins of Sycophancy in Large Language Modelscited by 50
  11. 2025When to use Graphs in RAG: A Comprehensive Analysis for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 48
  12. 2025TRUTH DECAY: Quantifying Multi-Turn Sycophancy in Language Modelscited by 33
  13. 2023An In-depth Survey of Large Language Model-based Artificial Intelligence Agentscited by 31
  14. 2025FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 28
  15. 2025BrokenMath: A Benchmark for Sycophancy in Theorem Proving with LLMscited by 27
  16. 2025Interaction Context Often Increases Sycophancy in LLMscited by 26
  17. 2026PersistBench: When Should Long-Term Memories Be Forgotten by LLMs?cited by 21
  18. 2026What Counts as AI Sycophancy? A Taxonomy and Expert Survey of a Fragmented Constructcited by 16
  19. 2026Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large language modelscited by 14
  20. 2025Sycophancy Mitigation Through Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptive Reasoning Trajectoriescited by 11
  21. 2026BenchPreS: A Benchmark for Context-Aware Personalized Preference Selectivity of Persistent-Memory LLMscited by 10
  22. 2026Good Arguments Against the People Pleasers: How Reasoning Mitigates (Yet Masks) LLM Sycophancycited by 8
  23. 2026Diagnosing and Mitigating Sycophancy and Skepticism in LLM Causal Judgmentcited by 5
  24. 2026LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoningcited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.

12 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025MemBench: Towards More Comprehensive Evaluation on the Memory of LLM-based Agents
  2. 2026MemGym: a Long-Horizon Memory Environment for LLM Agents
  3. 2026EvoMemBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory from a Self-Evolving Perspective
  4. 2026MemSecBench: Tracking Agent Memory Poisoning from Persistence to Consequence and Repair
  5. 2025How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior
  6. 2026PM-Bench: Evaluating Prospective Memory in LLM Agents
  7. 2026When to Forget: A Memory Governance Primitive
  8. 2026MemAudit: Auditing Long-Term Agent Memory via Hidden User-State Recovery