AgeMem: Unified Long- and Short-Term Memory for LLM Agents (2026)
FreeFirst to unify LTM (add/update/delete) and STM (retrieve/summarize/filter) as tool-based actions via GRPO RL; 7B model achieves +49.59% over no-memory baseline across 5 benchmarks; ICLR 2026 MemAgents Workshop
About AgeMem: Unified Long- and Short-Term Memory for LLM Agents (2026)
Agentic Memory (AgeMem) is a unified framework for managing long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) in large language model (LLM) agents. It exposes memory operations—such as storing, retrieving, updating, summarizing, and discarding information—as tool-based actions that the agent can autonomously decide when to invoke. To train these unified behaviors, AgeMem employs a three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy with step-wise GRPO to handle sparse and discontinuous rewards. Evaluated on five long-horizon benchmarks, AgeMem consistently outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines, achieving improved task performance, higher-quality long-term memory, and more efficient context usage. The approach is open-source with code available, and a 7B parameter model version demonstrated a 49.59% improvement over a no-memory baseline. AgeMem was accepted as an ACL 2026 SAC Highlight.
Key Features
Pros & Cons
- First unified approach for LTM and STM management within the LLM agent's policy
- Significant performance gains over no-memory and memory-augmented baselines (49.59% improvement)
- Open-source with publicly available code
- Efficient context usage reducing strain on finite context windows
- Requires reinforcement learning training which can be computationally expensive
- Primarily validated on 7B parameter models; scalability to larger models is untested
- Implementation complexity due to multi-stage training pipeline
- As a research framework, not yet packaged as a plug-and-play tool