Paper Detail

ActiveMem: Distributed Active Memory for Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning

Yunhan Jiang, Wenbin Duan, Shasha Guo, Liang Pang, Xiaoqian Sun, Huawei Shen

arxiv Score 16.3

Published 2026-06-09 · First seen 2026-06-10

General AI

Abstract

Memory is essential for enabling large language model (LLM) agents to handle long-horizon reasoning tasks. Existing memory mechanisms are largely centralized, typically organizing retrieved information and interaction history within a single model context. This design imposes a fundamental trade-off: scaling reasoning trajectories risks context overload, whereas aggressive content pruning may result in irreversible information loss. Seeking a better trade-off, we draw inspiration from human cognitive systems, especially the functional complementarity between the prefrontal cortex (executive control) and the hippocampus (memory management), suggesting that such a trade-off need not be inherent, but may instead stem from centralized memory organization. To this end, we propose ActiveMem, a heterogeneous framework that decouples agent memory from the core reasoning process. Specifically, a high-level Planner utilizes distilled semantic gists to execute reasoning, while a lightweight, distributed memory system operates in parallel to actively accumulate and consolidate these gists throughout the task. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus and GAIA show that ActiveMem achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly reduced overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of distributed active memory for long-horizon reasoning.

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BibTeX

@article{jiang2026activemem,
  title = {ActiveMem: Distributed Active Memory for Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning},
  author = {Yunhan Jiang and Wenbin Duan and Shasha Guo and Liang Pang and Xiaoqian Sun and Huawei Shen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Memory is essential for enabling large language model (LLM) agents to handle long-horizon reasoning tasks. Existing memory mechanisms are largely centralized, typically organizing retrieved information and interaction history within a single model context. This design imposes a fundamental trade-off: scaling reasoning trajectories risks context overload, whereas aggressive content pruning may result in irreversible information loss. Seeking a better trade-off, we draw inspiration from human cogn},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10532},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2606.10532},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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