mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning Situation-Conditioned Thinking Policies for Long-Term LLM Agents

arXiv 2610.09590 ↗First posted 7 Oct 2026cs.AI cs.ROcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking also fits: Reasoning for agents, planning and code

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Abstract (arXiv)

Long-running autonomous agents must reuse accumulated reasoning experience without allowing explicit historical memory and LLM context to grow indefinitely. However, existing memory mechanisms mainly retrieve, summarize, or compress past content and do not directly learn when particular kinds of thinking should be activated or discover new thinking knowledge from temporally dispersed experiences. This paper proposes a situation-conditioned thinking memory framework that transforms historical reasoning experience into a lightweight policy for predicting what should be thought about in the current situation, while leaving detailed reasoning to a large language model. Situations may represent temporal or spatiotemporal evolution rather than only current states. Temporary experiences are also periodically analyzed across multiple independent episodes to identify repeated long-range regularities, which are consolidated into new thinking knowledge and further internalized by the lightweight policy. Experiments show that the learned policy achieves 1.000 F1 on temporal-rule generalization, improves DeepSeek reasoning F1 from 0.789 to 0.868, reduces online processing time from 0.3636 ms to 0.0382 ms per query at 30,000 historical situations, and reaches 1.000 relation-discovery F1 and future-thinking accuracy after sufficient repeated cross-experience evidence.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 2 of its 14 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

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2 of 14 references.

References · 2

  1. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  2. 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,295

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  3. 2023Think-in-Memory: Recalling and Post-thinking Enable LLMs with Long-Term Memory
  4. 2025MemGen: Weaving Generative Latent Memory for Self-Evolving Agents
  5. 2025Time-R1: Towards Comprehensive Temporal Reasoning in LLMs
  6. 2026PRO-LONG: Programmatic Memory Enables Long-Horizon Reasoning
  7. 2026When Can Agents Forget Their Reasoning? ICLR for Long-Horizon Agent Context Compression
  8. 2026Meta-Cognitive Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agents