mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

LifeMem: Enabling Lifelong Experience Reuse for LLM Agents

arXiv 2609.12655 ↗First posted 11 Sep 2026cs.CLcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model agents are expected to continuously adapt to new tasks and environments over their lifetime by reusing past experience. However, existing memory-based agents struggle to transfer reusable experience across environments and suffer from catastrophic forgetting as experience accumulated. To address these challenges, we propose LifeMem, a lifelong learning framework that enables agents to transfer knowledge across multiple environments. During learning, LifeMem clusters accumulated interaction trajectories based on underlying workflows to extract reusable skills. When solving a new task at inference time, the agent recalls relevant skills and trajectories to guide actions. To validate our method, we conduct experiments across 10 environments and over 13k tasks with 2k newly annotated interaction trajectories. Results show that LifeMem enables effective experience reuse in lifelong learning, achieving both reduced forgetting on learned tasks and superior cross-task transfer. Further analysis reveals that task streaming impacts learning, while consolidating structurally similar trajectories within memory boosts performance.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 35 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.

Builds on

35 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution20 Mar
  2. 2025LifelongAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents as Lifelong Learners17 May
  3. 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory20 Jan
  4. 2025Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap13 Jan
  5. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents21 Apr

Other references · 30

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  4. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  5. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
  6. 2018FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERificationcited by 1,362
  7. 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,295
  8. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  9. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  10. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,197
  11. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
  12. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
18 more
  1. 2024AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-turn LLM Agentscited by 319
  2. 2022ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?cited by 298
  3. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
  4. 2020MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformerscited by 240
  5. 2025MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agentcited by 235
  6. 2023Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHFcited by 181
  7. 2023Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Controlcited by 180
  8. 2019LAMOL: LAnguage MOdeling for Lifelong Language Learningcited by 156
  9. 2023Continual Pre-Training of Large Language Models: How to (re)warm your model?cited by 135
  10. 2023Retroformer: Retrospective Large Language Agents with Policy Gradient Optimizationcited by 110
  11. 2021Continual Learning for Text Classification with Information Disentanglement Based Regularizationcited by 86
  12. 2022Continual Pre-Training Mitigates Forgetting in Language and Visioncited by 82
  13. 2022CLiMB: A Continual Learning Benchmark for Vision-and-Language Taskscited by 68
  14. 2024Large Language Models as Foundations for Next-Gen Dense Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical Assessmentcited by 19
  15. 2025Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skillscited by 19
  16. 2025Retrospex: Language Agent Meets Offline Reinforcement Learning Criticcited by 12
  17. 2026Mem2Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillationcited by 10
  18. 2024ViLCo-Bench: VIdeo Language COntinual learning Benchmarkcited by 9

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  2. 2026PATH-Bench: Path-Dependent Evaluation of Lifelong Agents
  3. 2026Learning While Acting: A Skill-Enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution Framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents
  4. 2026DELTAMEM: Incremental Experience Memory for LLM Agents via Residual Trees
  5. 2026LIMBO: Lifelong Inference-Time Memory and Budget Optimization for LLM Agents
  6. 2026AdMem: Advanced Memory for Task-solving Agents
  7. 2026When Continual Learning Moves to Memory: A Study of Experience Reuse in LLM Agents
  8. 2025Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution