Mem-T: Densifying Rewards for Long-Horizon Memory Agents
Yanwei Yue, Guibin Zhang, Boci Peng, Xuanbo Fan, Jiaxin Guo, Qiankun Li, Yan Zhang
Abstract
Memory agents, which depart from predefined memory-processing pipelines by endogenously managing the processing, storage, and retrieval of memories, have garnered increasing attention for their autonomy and adaptability. However, existing training paradigms remain constrained: agents often traverse long-horizon sequences of memory operations before receiving sparse and delayed rewards, which hinders truly end-to-end optimization of memory management policies. To address this limitation, we introduce Mem-T, an autonomous memory agent that interfaces with a lightweight hierarchical memory database to perform dynamic updates and multi-turn retrieval over streaming inputs. To effectively train long-horizon memory management capabilities, we further propose MoT-GRPO, a tree-guided reinforcement learning framework that transforms sparse terminal feedback into dense, step-wise supervision via memory operation tree backpropagation and hindsight credit assignment, thereby enabling the joint optimization of memory construction and retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mem-T is (1) high-performing, surpassing frameworks such as A-Mem and Mem0 by up to , and (2) economical, operating on a favorable accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier and reducing inference tokens per query by relative to GAM without sacrificing performance.
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- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP TasksPatrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 19,162 citations
- A-Mem: Agentic Memory for LLM AgentsWujiang Xu, Zujie Liang, Kai Mei, Hang Gao et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 1,138 citations
- ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential LearnersAndrew Zhao, Daniel Huang, Quentin Xu, Matthieu Lin et al.AAAI 2024 · 484 citations
- MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term MemoryWanjun Zhong, Lianghong Guo, Qiqi Gao, He Ye et al.AAAI 2024 · 394 citations
- ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning NeedsCheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Qi He, Hongru Wang et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 387 citations
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