More Memory, Worse Agents: Error Reproduction and Anti-Persistence in LLM Agents

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

This paper shows that accumulating more memory can degrade LLM agent performance through error reproduction, where stored mistakes regenerate themselves via new abstractions. It proposes Anti-Persistence, a method that keeps trajectories but reconstructs task-specific guidance on demand, achieving higher success and lower LLM-call cost across benchmarks.

LLM agents can improve across tasks without updating model parameters by storing experience from their own executions in external memory and reusing it to guide later decisions. A central design question is whether to retain only observed trajectories and outcomes or also the rules, summaries, and skills inferred from them. Retaining these abstractions allows agents to reuse strategies without repeatedly deriving them from raw trajectories. However, errors in stored abstractions can propagate to subsequent decisions through retrieval and reuse. They can also shape execution trajectories, which then become the basis for new abstractions that reproduce the original errors. We term this feedback mechanism error reproduction: errors are regenerated through a cycle of abstraction, execution, and re-abstraction, extending their persistence beyond direct reuse of the original faulty knowledge. We propose Anti-Persistence, a memory design that accumulates trajectories and outcomes while reconstructing task-specific guidance on demand. An adaptive selector uses prior outcomes to decide whether and how to synthesize guidance, which is discarded after execution. This prevents its direct reuse as a stored object, although indirect feedback through retained trajectories remains possible. Across different benchmarks and backbones, Anti-Persistence achieves higher overall held-out success and the lowest average LLM-call cost among the evaluated memory designs. These results support separating experience accumulation from abstraction persistence in memorybased self-improvement.
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Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.27406 Hi everyone! 👋

Can more memory make an LLM agent worse?

We study error reproduction: mistakes in stored rules or skills can shape future executions, which then produce new abstractions that regenerate the same mistakes.

We propose Anti-Persistence: retain trajectories and outcomes, but reconstruct task-specific guidance on demand and discard it after execution. An adaptive selector decides whether and how to generate this guidance.

Across the benchmarks and models we evaluated, Anti-Persistence achieves higher overall held-out success and the lowest average LLM-call cost among the compared memory designs.

Our takeaway: accumulating experience and permanently storing its interpretations are separate design choices.

We’d love to hear your experiences with agent memory and recurring errors. Happy to answer questions!

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