# TARL: Transaction-Aware Reliable Ledgers for Executable Memory Management in Long-Term Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03699 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03699/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13501/) (2024)
- [Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08164/) (2021)
- [Memory-Based Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06520/) (2022)
- [Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15110/) (2021)
- [MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02259/) (2025)
- [Know-Evolve: Deep Temporal Reasoning for Dynamic Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05742/) (2017)
- [MemoRAG: Boosting Long Context Processing with Global Memory-Enhanced Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05591/) (2024)
- [Tensor Decompositions for temporal knowledge base completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04926/) (2020)
- [Diachronic Embedding for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03143/) (2019)
- [Belief Revision: The Adaptability of Large Language Models Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19764/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16548/) (2026)
- [Red Teaming Language Models for Processing Contradictory Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10128/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Benchmark and Diagnostic Study of Epistemic Admission in Shared Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30813/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Persistent memory helps long-term agents retain knowledge, yet a single update error can repeatedly distort future retrieval and reasoning. Most existing systems reduce memory updating to a binary Write/Hold decision, which cannot distinguish whether new information should be added, ignored, used to revise an outdated belief, rejected as unreliable, or deferred for verification. These choices may share the same binary label while producing fundamentally different memory states. We introduce TARL, a memory state update framework that maps each statement to one of five executable actions. TARL identifies the affected memory, resolves its temporal scope, compares source reliability, and updates accepted, pending, and rejected ledgers. It is further trained by comparing the memory states produced by alternative update operations, encouraging the model to select the operation that leads to the correct result. We also introduce TARL-Mem, a benchmark with fine-grained action labels and next-state targets. Across in-domain, cross-source, temporal, counterfactual, and sequential evaluations, TARL improves action prediction and state recovery, reduces memory pollution, preserves conflicting evidence, and limits cumulative corruption.