Paper Detail

Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents

Chongrui Ye, Yuxiang Liu, Yu Wang, Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, Ge Liu, Julian McAuley, Jiaxuan You

arxiv Score 14.8

Published 2026-05-20 · First seen 2026-05-25

Research Track A · Research Track B · General AI

Abstract

Language agents increasingly operate over streams of related tasks, yet existing memory systems struggle to convert accumulated experience into reusable knowledge. Retrieval-augmented and structured memory methods record per-session observations effectively, but often couple acquisition and consolidation into a single online process, leaving the agent without a global view across sessions to discover recurring patterns, abstract shared procedures, or prune redundant entries. Inspired by complementary learning systems theory, we propose Auto-Dreamer, a learned offline consolidator for language-agent memory. Auto-Dreamer decouples fast per-session memory acquisition from slow cross-session consolidation. Given a selected working region of a typed memory bank, the consolidator treats the region as read-only evidence, performs bounded tool-use to inspect entries and provenance-linked source trajectories, and synthesizes a fresh compact replacement set that abstracts across sessions and supersedes the original region. We train Auto-Dreamer via GRPO, using end-to-end agent performance as the reward signal to learn how to consolidate memories acquired through fast online experience. Trained on ScienceWorld trajectories alone, Auto-Dreamer outperforms fixed, RL-trained, and prompted memory baselines on ScienceWorld by 7 points while using an active memory bank 12$\times$ smaller than the strongest baseline, and continues to lead on held-out ALFWorld and WebArena without retraining -- using 6$\times$ less memory than the strongest baseline on ALFWorld.

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BibTeX

@article{ye2026auto,
  title = {Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents},
  author = {Chongrui Ye and Yuxiang Liu and Yu Wang and Haofei Yu and Yining Zhao and Ge Liu and Julian McAuley and Jiaxuan You},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Language agents increasingly operate over streams of related tasks, yet existing memory systems struggle to convert accumulated experience into reusable knowledge. Retrieval-augmented and structured memory methods record per-session observations effectively, but often couple acquisition and consolidation into a single online process, leaving the agent without a global view across sessions to discover recurring patterns, abstract shared procedures, or prune redundant entries. Inspired by compleme},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20616},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2605.20616},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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