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