持续更新导致LLM智能体记忆效用衰退
Useful Memories Become Faulty When Continuously Updated by LLMs
研究发现,当前由大语言模型驱动的智能体记忆系统在持续整合更新记忆时,会产生错误记忆,导致性能不升反降。即使基于完全正确的经验进行整合,GPT-4在部分问题上仍有54%的失败率,而这些问题是其无记忆时曾成功解决的。性能衰退源于整合步骤本身,而非原始经验。在受控测试中,默认保留原始经历片段的智能体,其准确率是强制整合版本的两倍;完全禁用整合、仅进行片段管理,能达到与自动管理相当的性能。因此,稳健的智能体记忆系统应将原始经历片段视为首要证据,并明确控制整合的触发条件,而非在每次交互后都自动执行。
LLM 整合记忆的常规套路被这篇论文掀了桌子。连续更新反而会把有用的经验搞坏,甚至 GPT-5.4 自己解过的题,加上记忆后正确率暴跌。做 agent 的人值得认真看看,记忆架构可能要转向保留原始轨迹。
Learning from past experience benefits from two complementary forms of memory: episodic traces -- raw trajectories of what happened -- and consolidated abstractions distilled across many episodes into reusable, schema-like lessons. Recent agentic-memory systems pursue the consolidated form: an LLM rewrites past trajectories into a textual memory bank that it continuously updates with new interactions, promising self-improving agents without parameter updates. Yet we find that such consolidated memories produced by today's LLMs are often faulty even when derived from useful experiences. As consolidation proceeds, memory utility first rises, then degrades, and can fall below the no-memory baseline. More surprisingly, even when consolidating from ground-truth solutions, GPT-5.4 fails on 54% of a set of ARC-AGI problems it had previously solved without memory. We trace the regression to the consolidation step rather than the underlying experience: the same trajectories yield qualitatively different memories under different update schedules, and an episodic-only control that simply retains those trajectories remains competitive with the consolidators we test. In a controlled ARC-AGI Stream environment that exposes Retain, Delete, and Consolidate actions, agents preserve raw episodes by default and double the accuracy of their forced-consolidation counterparts; disabling consolidation entirely (episodic management only) matches this auto regime. Practically, robust agent memory should treat raw episodes as first-class evidence and gate consolidation explicitly rather than firing it after every interaction. Looking forward, reliable agentic memory will require LLMs that can consolidate without overwriting the evidence they depend on.
来源:HuggingFace Daily Papers(社区热门论文) · arxiv.org