Memory Research

AI Memory Research, Explained Simply

A curated library of the most important papers on memory in AI systems — from foundational RAG to agentic long-term memory. Each paper explained in plain language.

314 papers curated4 must-reads16 categories

314 papers

Editor's picks

Must-read memory papers

PickRAGBenchmark

From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models

Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez, Yiheng Shu et al.

ICML 2025 · 2025

HippoRAG 2 combines Offline Indexing, a schema-less Knowledge Graph, Dense-Sparse Integration, Deeper Contextualization, and Recognition Memory into a neuro-inspired non-parametric memory system for LLMs. On the joint RAG benchmark suite, HippoRAG 2 achieves 59.8 average F1 versus 57.0 for NV-Embed-v2, including 71.0 F1 on 2Wiki compared to 61.5 for NV-Embed-v2.

PickLong-Term Memory

Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory

Prateek Chhikara, Dev Khant et al.

arXiv 2025 · 2025

Mem0 incrementally processes conversations using the extraction phase, update phase, asynchronous summary generation module, tool call mechanism, and a vector database to build scalable long-term memory. On the LOCOMO benchmark, Mem0 attains a J score of 67.13 on single-hop questions versus 63.79 for OpenAI and cuts p95 latency from 17.117s to 1.440s compared to the full-context baseline.

PickMemory Architecture

MemOS: A Memory OS for AI System

Zhiyu Li, Chenyang Xi et al.

arXiv 2025 · 2025

MemOS introduces MemCube, MemScheduler, MemOperator, and MemLifecycle to treat plaintext, activation, and parameter memories as first-class resources with unified APIs and governance. MemOS achieves state-of-the-art performance across PreFEval, PersonaMem, LongMemEval, and LoCoMo compared to MIRIX, Mem0, Zep, Memobase, MemU, and Supermemory, though exact benchmark scores are only summarized qualitatively in Figure 1.

PickMemory Architecture

Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time

Ali Behrouz, Peilin Zhong, Vahab Mirrokni

arXiv 2025 · 2025

Titans combines a Core short-term attention block, a deep Long-term Memory module, and Persistent Memory tokens, with three integration variants: Memory as a Context (MAC), Memory as a Gate (MAG), and Memory as a Layer (MAL). On language modeling and reasoning benchmarks, Titans (MAC) at 760M parameters achieves 52.51 average accuracy vs 51.49 for Gated DeltaNet-H2, while also solving BABILong tasks that defeat GPT-4.

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Memory Architecture

A Control Architecture for Training-Free Memory Use

Yanzhen Lu, Muchen Jiang et al.

· 2026

TAG routes low-confidence steps to uncertainty-based routing, filters them with guarded acceptance with rollback, chooses between bank selection across rule and exemplar memory, and prunes via evidence-based retirement inside a unified control loop. On SVAMP and ASDiv, TAG reaches 81.0% and 85.2% accuracy, improving over the 74.0% and 77.5% no-memory baselines while a compute-matched Retry baseline stays flat.

BenchmarkAgent Memory

Active Context Compression: Autonomous Memory Management in LLM Agents

Nikhil Verma

· 2026

Focus Agent adds start_focus, complete_focus, a persistent Knowledge block, and an optimized Persistent Bash plus String-Replace Editor scaffold to actively compress context during long software-engineering tasks. On five hard SWE-bench Lite instances against a Baseline ReAct agent, Focus Agent achieves 22.7% token reduction (14.9M → 11.5M) while matching 3/5 = 60% task success.

Agent Memory

ActMem: Bridging the Gap Between Memory Retrieval and Reasoning in LLM Agents

Xiaohui Zhang, Zequn Sun et al.

· 2026

ActMem transforms dialogue history into atomic facts via Memory Fact Extraction, groups them with Fact Clustering, links them through a Memory KG Construction module, and uses Counterfactual-based Retrieval and Reasoning for action-aware answers. On ActMemEval, ActMem reaches 76.52% QA accuracy with DeepSeek-V3, beating LightMem’s 63.97% by 12.55 points and NaiveRAG’s 61.54%.

Agent MemoryLong-Term Memory

Adaptive Memory Admission Control for LLM Agents

Guilin Zhang, Wei Jiang et al.

· 2026

A-MAC scores candidate memories using Utility, Confidence, Novelty, Recency, and Type Prior combined by a learned linear admission policy with Algorithm 1 A-MAC Memory Admission. On the LoCoMo benchmark, A-MAC achieves F1 0.583 and 2644 ms latency, improving F1 by 0.042 and reducing latency by 1187 ms compared to A-mem.

Long-Term Memory

Advancing Open-source World Models

Robbyant Team, Zelin Gao et al.

arXiv 2026 · 2026

LingBot-World combines a Data Engine, Fundamental World Model, Action-Conditioned World Model, and Post-Training causal adaptation to turn a 28B-parameter video generator into a real-time interactive world simulator. On the VBench benchmark, LingBot-World achieves a dynamic degree of 0.8857 versus 0.7612 for Yume-1.5, while also improving imaging quality to 0.6683.

RAG

A Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation System with Selective Memory and Remembrance

Okan Bursa

· 2026

Adaptive RAG Memory (ARM) augments a standard retriever–generator stack with a Dynamic Embedding Layer and Remembrance Engine that track usage statistics and apply selective remembrance and decay to embeddings. On a lightweight retrieval benchmark, ARM achieves NDCG@5 ≈ 0.9401 and Recall@5 = 1.000 with 22M parameters, matching larger baselines like gte-small while providing the best efficiency among ultra-efficient models.

Cognitive ArchitectureAgent Memory

Aeon: High-Performance Neuro-Symbolic Memory Management for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Mustafa Arslan

· 2026

Aeon restructures LLM memory using the Atlas, Trace, Semantic Lookaside Buffer, Write Ahead Log, and Sidecar Blob Arena inside a zero copy Core Shell kernel. Aeon achieves 4.70 ns INT8 dot products, 3.09 µs Atlas traversal at 100K nodes, 3.1× compression, and P99 read latency of 750 ns under 16 thread contention compared to FP32 and flat scan baselines.

BenchmarkBenchmarkLong-Term Memory

AgenticAI-DialogGen: Topic-Guided Conversation Generation for Fine-Tuning and Evaluating Short- and Long-Term Memories of LLMs

Manoj Madushanka Perera, Adnan Mahmood et al.

· 2026

AgenticAI-DialogGen chains ChatPreprocessor, KnowledgeExtractor, TopicAnalyzer, KnowledgeGraphBuilder, PersonaGenerator, DuelingChat Agent, ConversationValidator, ConversationRefiner, QAGeneration, and PostProcessing to turn raw multi-session chats into topic-guided, persona-grounded conversations with explicit short- and long-term memories. On the TGC / KG memory QA benchmark, Mistral-7B fine-tuned within AgenticAI-DialogGen achieves 87.36 F1, compared to GPT-4’s 83.77 F1 in a zero-shot setting on the same task.

BenchmarkAgent Memory

Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents

Yi Yu, Liuyi Yao et al.

arXiv 2026 · 2026

Agentic Memory (AgeMem) exposes memory management tools, a three-stage progressive RL strategy, and step-wise GRPO directly inside the agent policy to jointly control long-term and short-term memory. On Qwen3-4B-Instruct, AgeMem attains 54.31% average performance across ALFWorld, SciWorld, PDDL, BabyAI, and HotpotQA, exceeding the best baseline A-Mem at 45.74%.

BenchmarkAgent Memory

Agent Memory Below the Prompt: Persistent Q4 KV Cache for Multi-Agent LLM Inference on Edge Devices

Yakov Pyotr Shkolnikov

· 2026

Agent Memory Below the Prompt stores each agent’s KV state in a block pool, quantizes it via a Q4 pipeline, reloads it with BatchQuantizedKVCache, and reuses it across phases using cross-phase context injection. On Gemma 3 12B, Agent Memory Below the Prompt reduces cold TTFT from 172,096 ms to 1,264 ms at 32K context (136×) compared to FP16 prefix caching baselines like vllm-mlx.

Agent Memory

Agent Memory: Characterization and System Implications of Stateful Long-Horizon Workloads

Yasmine Omri, Ziyu Gan et al.

arXiv 2026 · 2026

Agent Memory decomposes agent workloads into ingestion, memory construction, storage, retrieval, prompt assembly, generation, and maintenance, and classifies ten systems across four paradigms. Agent Memory’s profiling on MemoryAgentBench and MemoryArena reveals over 47× spread in lifecycle energy per correct answer and two orders of magnitude differences in serving latency across paradigms.

Cognitive ArchitectureAgent Memory

Aligning Progress and Feasibility: A Neuro-Symbolic Dual Memory Framework for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Bin Wen, Ruoxuan Zhang et al.

· 2026

Neuro-Symbolic Dual Memory Framework uses Progress Memory, Feasibility Memory, a Blueprint Planner Agent, a Progress Monitor Agent, and an Actor Agent to decouple semantic progress guidance from executable feasibility checks. On ALFWorld, Neuro-Symbolic Dual Memory Framework achieves 94.78% success rate versus 88.81% for AWM, and on WebShop reaches 0.7132 score versus 0.5998 for WALL-E 2.0.

Benchmark

AlpsBench: An LLM Personalization Benchmark for Real-Dialogue Memorization and Preference Alignment

Jianfei Xiao, Xiang Yu et al.

· 2026

AlpsBench combines Personalized Information Extraction, Personalized Information Update, Personalized Information Retrieval, and Personalized Information Utilization over 2,500 WildChat dialogues with human-verified structured memories. AlpsBench shows, for example, that Gemini-3 Flash scores 51.67 on Task 1 Extraction while DeepSeek Reasoner reaches 0.9569 retrieval recall with 100 distractors on AlpsBench.

Agent MemoryLong-Term Memory

AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Weiquan Huang, Zixuan Wang et al.

· 2026

AMA orchestrates four agents — the Constructor, Retriever, Judge, and Refresher — to build Raw Text, Fact Knowledge, and Episode Memory and route queries adaptively across these granularities. On the LoCoMo benchmark with GPT-4.1-mini, AMA achieves an overall LLM Score of 0.805 compared to Nemori’s 0.774, while reducing token consumption by approximately 80% relative to FullContext.

BenchmarkBenchmarkLong-Term Memory

A-MBER: Affective Memory Benchmark for Emotion Recognition

Deliang Wen, Ke Sun, Yu Wang

· 2026

A-MBER builds multi-session conversational scenarios via a staged pipeline of persona specification, long-horizon planning, conversation generation, annotation, question construction, and benchmark-unit packaging. On A-MBER, a structured memory system reaches 0.69 judgment accuracy, 0.66 retrieval, and 0.65 explanation versus 0.34, 0.29, and 0.31 for a no-memory baseline.

BenchmarkAgent Memory

AMemGym: Interactive Memory Benchmarking for Assistants in Long-Horizon Conversations

Cheng Jiayang, Dongyu Ru et al.

· 2026

AMemGym combines Structured Data Generation, On-Policy Interaction, Evaluation Metrics, and Meta-Evaluation to script user state trajectories, drive LLM-simulated role-play, and score write–read–utilization behavior. On AMemGym’s base configuration, AWE-(2,4,30) reaches a 0.291 normalized memory score on interactive evaluation, while native gpt-4.1-mini only achieves 0.203, exposing substantial gaps between memory agents and plain long-context LLMs.

Agent MemoryLong-Term Memory

AMV-L: Lifecycle-Managed Agent Memory for Tail-Latency Control in Long-Running LLM Systems

Emmanuel Bamidele

· 2026

AMV-L manages agent memory using a Memory Value Model, Tiered Lifecycle, Bounded Retrieval Path, and Lifecycle Manager to decouple retention from retrieval eligibility. Under a 70k-request long-running workload, AMV-L improves throughput from 9.027 to 36.977 req/s over TTL and reduces p99 latency from 5398.167 ms to 1233.430 ms while matching LRU’s retrieval quality.

SurveyAgent Memory

Anatomy of Agentic Memory: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis of Evaluation and System Limitations

Dongming Jiang, Yi Li et al.

arXiv 2026 · 2026

Anatomy of Agentic Memory organizes agentic memory into four structures using components like Lightweight Semantic Memory, Entity-Centric and Personalized Memory, Episodic and Reflective Memory, and Structured and Hierarchical Memory. Anatomy of Agentic Memory then reports comparative results such as Nemori’s 0.781 semantic judge score on LoCoMo versus SimpleMem’s 0.298, and latency differences like 1.129s for Nemori versus 32.372s for MemoryOS.

BenchmarkBenchmark

APEX-EM: Non-Parametric Online Learning for Autonomous Agents via Structured Procedural-Episodic Experience Replay

Pratyay Banerjee, Masud Moshtaghi, Ankit Chadha

· 2026

APEX-EM combines a Procedural Knowledge Graph, Experience Memory store, PRGII workflow, Task Verifiers, and StructuralSignatureExtractor to store and reuse full procedural-episodic traces without changing model weights. On KGQAGen-10k, APEX-EM reaches 89.6% accuracy (95.3% CSR) versus 41.3% without memory and surpasses the GPT-4o w/ SP oracle at 84.9%.

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Why we built this

Memory is the missing piece of truly useful AI. Without memory, every conversation starts from scratch, with no context, no personalization, and no real understanding of who you are or what you need.

At Mem0, we're building the memory layer for AI. This site is our way of sharing the research that inspired and informs our work, made accessible to everyone, not just academics.

Each paper here represents a step toward AI systems that genuinely remember, learn, and improve over time. We hope this collection helps you understand where the field is headed.