MemPrice: Online Memory Allocation via Adaptive Pricing for Long-Horizon Agents

Yiming Zong, Shiyuan Piao, Jiashuo Jiang, Fugee Tsung

Long-horizon LLM agents face a fundamental allocation problem as interaction histories grow: which information to retain, how much context to devote to it, and at what granularity. Existing memory mechanisms largely focus on relevance, retrieval, or compression, leaving this allocation trade-off implicit. We introduce MemPrice, which treats active context as a shared resource and dynamically allocates it across memories and representation levels. MemPrice turns accumulated memory pressure into an adaptive price on context, encouraging detail only when its estimated retention value justifies the additional footprint. This pressure persists across memory refreshes, allowing the contents of memory to evolve while preserving long-run control over context usage. We show that irreversible compression can force linear worst-case regret against hindsight following its own memory trajectory, and introduce a same-state benchmark to evaluate allocation on MemPrice's realized memory states. MemPrice enforces the hard context budget at every round and regulates long-run occupancy through adaptive pricing, without prior knowledge of the interaction horizon. Under priced-frontier regularity,…