Evaluating Memory in LLM Agents via Incremental Multi-Turn Interactions
Authors: name: Yuanzhe Hu; name: Yu Wang; name: Julian McAuley
Published: 2025-07-07 17:59:54

Abstract: Recent benchmarks for Large Language Model (LLM) agents primarily focus on
evaluating reasoning, planning, and execution capabilities, while another
critical component-memory, encompassing how agents memorize, update, and
retrieve long-term information-is under-evaluated due to the lack of
benchmarks. We term agents with memory mechanisms as memory agents. In this
paper, we identify four core competencies essential for memory agents: accurate
retrieval, test-time learning, long-range understanding, and conflict
resolution. Existing datasets either rely on limited context lengths or are
tailored for static, long-context settings like book-based QA, which do not
reflect the interactive, multi-turn nature of memory agents that incrementally
accumulate information. Furthermore, no existing benchmarks cover all four
competencies. Therefore, we introduce MemoryAgentBench, a new benchmark
specifically designed for memory agents. Our benchmark combines reformulated
existing datasets with newly constructed ones, covering the above four memory
competencies, providing a systematic and challenging testbed for assessing
memory quality. We evaluate a diverse set of memory agents, ranging from simple
context-based and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to advanced
agents with external memory modules and tool integration. Empirical results
reveal that current methods fall short of mastering all four competencies,
underscoring the need for further research into comprehensive memory mechanisms
for LLM agents.