Paper Detail

RPMem: Learning Long-Term Recurrent Parametric Memory Across Sessions for LLM Agents

Fanyu Zhao, Ruike Cao, Liang Dong, Fugen Yao, Jian Xu, Guanjun Jiang, Han Zhang, Yifei Zhao, Yinsheng Li

arxiv Score 23.8

Published 2026-09-20 · First seen 2026-09-22

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Long-running LLM agents require memory that persists and evolves across sessions. Text-based memory retrieves and reconstructs past interactions at every query, making long-horizon performance increasingly dependent on retrieval quality and contextual reasoning as histories grow. Parametric memory encodes experience directly into model computation, but existing approaches provide limited support for cross-session memory evolution. Their coupling to a specific backbone further restricts memory reuse after model replacement. We introduce RPMem, a two-stage architecture that compiles each session into a model-independent latent memory through forward computation and selectively integrates it with retained memory via a task-trained recurrent gate. The consolidated memory is then mapped to backbone-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) parameters, allowing the encoding capability to transfer when the backbone is replaced. Evaluation across three long-term memory benchmarks and five diverse backbones demonstrates broad generalization with near-constant update cost and memory footprint. With Qwen3-8B on PERMA, RPMem reaches 85.52%, outperforming the strongest parametric and text-based baselines by 5.32 and 12.98 percentage points, respectively. Ablations validate the complementary roles of session compilation and cross-session consolidation, while dynamics analyses reveal that the gate acquires task-specific memory integration strategies. These results establish RPMem as a lifecycle-independent parametric memory framework that maintains evolving cross-session memory that remains reusable across backbone replacements. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Quark-Medical/rpmem/tree/main.

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BibTeX

@article{zhao2026rpmem,
  title = {RPMem: Learning Long-Term Recurrent Parametric Memory Across Sessions for LLM Agents},
  author = {Fanyu Zhao and Ruike Cao and Liang Dong and Fugen Yao and Jian Xu and Guanjun Jiang and Han Zhang and Yifei Zhao and Yinsheng Li},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Long-running LLM agents require memory that persists and evolves across sessions. Text-based memory retrieves and reconstructs past interactions at every query, making long-horizon performance increasingly dependent on retrieval quality and contextual reasoning as histories grow. Parametric memory encodes experience directly into model computation, but existing approaches provide limited support for cross-session memory evolution. Their coupling to a specific backbone further restricts memory re},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23466},
  keywords = {cs.CL, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2609.23466},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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