# Memory Type Varies: Empowering LLM Agents for Long-Term Memory with Diverse Strategies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11573 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11573/

## 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 37 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13956/) (2025)
- [R1-Searcher: Incentivizing the Search Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05592/) (2025)
- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04408/) (2023)
- [MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02259/) (2025)
- [Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19828/) (2025)
- [From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14802/) (2025)
- [LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18866/) (2025)
- [Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14225/) (2025)
- [MIRIX: Multi-Agent Memory System for LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07957/) (2025)
- [MemOS: A Memory OS for AI System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03724/) (2025)
- [Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07103/) (2024)
- [Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06433/) (2025)
- [MemoChat: Tuning LLMs to Use Memos for Consistent Long-Range Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08239/) (2023)
- [PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06688/) (2025)
- [From Isolated Conversations to Hierarchical Schemas: Dynamic Tree Memory Representation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14052/) (2024)
- [Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01885/) (2026)
- [Think-in-Memory: Recalling and Post-thinking Enable LLMs with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08719/) (2023)
- [Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08750/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Memory for High-Efficiency Long-Term Reasoning in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22925/) (2025)
- [Mem-α: Learning Memory Construction via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25911/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The memory capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention recently. Despite great success achieved, existing retrieval-based memory approaches typically overlook the differences between memories and employ a unified strategy to process all memories, leading to suboptimal performance. Thus, an intuitive question arises: can we categorize memory into different types and select appropriate strategies? However, given the topic-rich, scenario-complex, and boundary-blurred nature of memory scenarios, achieving precise classification of memories is not easy. To address this challenge, we propose a memory multi-class dataset in this paper, termed TriMEM, which provides precise annotations for memory types across diverse scenarios. Building upon this foundation, we propose a novel memory framework, named MemoType, which can adaptively recognize each memory and query type with the learned router model. With the memory and query routing, MemoType can retrieve the memory with corresponding query types and design tailored retrieval strategies, thereby enhancing the retrieval performance. Moreover, we theoretically prove that any single retrieval strategy is subject to a fundamental upper bound on its expected retrieval precision in multi-class corpora, leading to systematic precision degradation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that MemoType consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 16.18% improvement in Recall@1.
