# D2ACCI: A Dual-Loop Diagnostic Protocol for Evidence-Preserving Agent Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17756 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17756/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 15 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13956/) (2025)
- [MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02474/) (2026)
- [MemRL: Self-Evolving Agents via Runtime Reinforcement Learning on Episodic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03192/) (2026)
- [EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02163/) (2026)
- [MemMachine: A Ground-Truth-Preserving Memory System for Personalized AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04853/) (2026)
- [Explore with Long-term Memory: A Benchmark and Multimodal LLM-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Embodied Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10744/) (2026)
- [Mem2Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10923/) (2026)
- [Learning to Remember: End-to-End Training of Memory Agents for Long-Context Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18493/) (2026)
- [Do Self-Evolving Agents Forget? Capability Degradation and Preservation in Lifelong LLM Agent Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09315/) (2026)
- [From Passive Retrieval to Active Memory Navigation: Learning to Use Memory as a Structured Action Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05794/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Memory is a key capability of LLM agents. Persistent memory extends this across sessions---enabling recall, revision, and personalization. Yet its multi-stage pipeline (ingestion, retrieval, filtering, generation) makes failures difficult to localize: end-to-end evaluation reveals that an error occurred, but not which stage caused it. Existing evaluations often report aggregate performance without paired statistical comparisons, slice-level non-regression checks, or stage-level diagnostic traces. We propose D2ACCI (Diagnostic-Driven Artifact-based Closed-loop Controlled Iteration), a dual-loop protocol whose outer diagnostic gate promotes, feature-flags, or rejects memory interventions based on paired evidence, protected-slice monitoring, and trace-level localizability. We further introduce DCR, a graded observability metric that measures whether failures remain localizable, and D2ACCI-Eval, a reusable artifact for gate replay. We instantiate the protocol in MemStack and evaluate on three public benchmarks, achieving 93.59% on LoCoMo, 90.93% on LongMemEval, and 57.20% on PersonaMem-V2. Five paired ablations show that supplement extraction, session-memory retrieval, and Forget Guard yield statistically significant gains (+1.9 to +3.7pp, all p ≤ .003). In contrast, BM25/RRF is retained as a monitored feature flag---a distinction invisible to aggregate-only evaluation. A diagnostic audit shows enriched traces substantially improve root-cause agreement over result-only relabeling. Diagnostic artifacts reach 98--100% DCR@3 versus 0% for results-only logs. These results establish that robust memory-system iteration demands traceable, statistically grounded, and regression-aware evidence---exactly the gap D2ACCI fills.