Can Agents Forget When Asked? A Benchmark for Memory Unlearning in LLM Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
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Abstract (arXiv)
Long-term memory has become a core component of large language model (LLM) agents. As agents accumulate personal information over long-term use, users increasingly ask them to delete sensitive or outdated facts. A memory system should honor such requests. It should remove exactly what was requested and keep the rest of its memory intact. However, existing memory benchmarks evaluate only memory writing, retrieval, and organization, so whether agents can forget at the user's explicit request remains under-evaluated. To address this gap, we propose Bemula, the first benchmark dedicated to memory unlearning. It comprises 50 multi-session dialogue instances, 135 forget requests of six types, and 1,742 test questions. Each dialogue has a control version without the requests, so that only systems that have stored the target can earn credit for forgetting. Across the paired versions, five test suites measure storage, removal of the requested information, preservation of unrelated memories, relearning of similar facts, and resistance to extraction attacks. On Bemula, we evaluate six mainstream memory systems under three backbone LLMs, together with the Full Context LLM on two of them. The results are negative. Across all evaluated systems and backbones, no system passes more than 1.5% of forget requests end to end, and most pass none at all. These systems either leave the requested information extractable under simple attacks or delete far more than requested. Memory unlearning therefore remains an open challenge for agent memory design. We release our data and code at https://github.com/Nboxff/bemula-benchmark.
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 27 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.
Builds on
27 of 34 references.
Closest ancestors · 11
Same direction, newest first
- 2026From Recall to Forgetting: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for Personalized Agents21 Apr
- 2026MemoryArena: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Interdependent Multi-Session Agentic Tasks18 Feb
- 2026SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents5 Jan
- 2025Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning27 Aug
- 2025MIRIX: Multi-Agent Memory System for LLM-Based Agents10 Jul
- 2025Evaluating Memory in LLM Agents via Incremental Multi-Turn Interactions7 Jul
- 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory28 Apr
- 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents17 Feb
- 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory20 Jan
- 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents21 Apr
- 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents27 Feb
Other references · 16
- 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,297
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
- 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?cited by 1,651
- 2023LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understandingcited by 1,417
- 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,389
- 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,346
- 2023AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Accelerationcited by 1,298
- 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 707
- 2024Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personascited by 417
- 2024∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokenscited by 367
- 2022A Survey of Machine Unlearningcited by 312
4 more
- 2023In-Context Unlearning: Language Models as Few Shot Unlearnerscited by 224
- 2025LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generationcited by 180
- 2026DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compressioncited by 76
- 2024Trust No Bot: Discovering Personal Disclosures in Human-LLM Conversations in the Wildcited by 47
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