# Interpreting at Write Time: A Policy Ablation for Multi-Goal Agent Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02897/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [MemoryCD: Benchmarking Long-Context User Memory of LLM Agents for Lifelong Cross-Domain Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25973/) (2026)
- [On the Evolution of Knowledge Graphs: A Survey and Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04835/) (2023)
- [Towards Cognitive Synergy in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems: Integrating Theory of Mind and Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21969/) (2025)
- [A Multi-Memory Segment System for Generating High-Quality Long-Term Memory Content in Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15294/) (2025)
- [Rashomon Memory: Towards Argumentation-Driven Retrieval for Multi-Perspective Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03588/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A long-running assistant cannot keep everything it has seen, so it summarises. Summarising is not neutral: what is kept is chosen against some notion of what the record is for, and that choice is made once, before anyone knows which of the user's standing goals will ask. Goals rarely disagree about what happened. They disagree about which parts of it were worth the space. Once the history is too long to re-read, the summary replaces the stream, and whatever it left out is gone. We ask what a memory should summarise for when it serves several standing goals at once. Three policies answer differently: summarise with no goal in view, write one summary covering every goal, or write one summary per goal and read them together. We compare them across several models and event streams, holding the read step fixed so that only the write differs. The goals do pull apart: summaries written for different goals overlap each other less than a summary overlaps a rewrite of itself. Per-goal summaries win on relevance, completeness and accuracy, and the all-goal summary loses even to the neutral one written at a fraction of its budget. Interpreting at write pays off, but only for the goal that later asks.