Don't Just Trust Your Memory: Evidence-Linked Memory Reduces Memory-Induced Degradation in LLM Agents

Yukyeong Lee, Yumin Choi, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang

External memory enables LLM agents to improve from experience by distilling trajectories of past tasks into concise lessons for new tasks. However, memory can also lead to memory-induced degradation, where an agent fails on tasks it would solve without memory, often because it follows a lesson that is incorrect, or misapplies or misreads a valid one. This is because lessons are inferred from trajectories labeled only with task success or failure, yet are typically provided without the trajectories they came from, leaving the agent no way to check them. To address this, we introduce WikiTrace, an evidence-linked memory system designed to let agents check each lesson against its original trajectory. Specifically, motivated by the finding that a trajectory often still holds the evidence needed to catch an erroneous lesson, WikiTrace stores each lesson as a concise insight linked to a summary of why its trajectory succeeded or failed and to the raw trajectory itself. Then, on a new task, the agent starts from all insights and, whenever one lacks details needed to act, conflicts with another, or comes from a failed task, descends through its links with terminal tools to fill in…