MEMOIR: A Training-Free Memory Lifecycle for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Abstract

Long-horizon LLM agents require memory systems that preserve useful information across sessions and retrieve it when needed. Existing systems treat these as separate problems: memories are written prospectively with static importance scores that are never revised after use. This creates two coupled failure modes: consolidation can silently destroy evidence that future queries require, while retrieval continues to favor stale memories. We propose MEMOIR (Memory Evidence via Merge-certified, Online Importance Revision), a training-free memory lifecycle that unifies judge-gated consolidation with retrospective attribution. Before compressing memory, screening gates test whether answer-relevant evidence is preserved. After each query, attribution estimates which retrieved memories supported the answer and updates their retrieval priority. A UCB-style exploration bonus additionally encourages retrieval of under-exposed memories, reducing the risk that frequently retrieved memories crowd out useful but less-seen evidence. On 1,905 deduplicated LoCoMo QA pairs, the full retrieval stack improves evidence recall@5 by 11.92 percentage points over bare cosine, with confidence-gated feedback adding 1.50 points overall without reference answers or reranker training; a deployment-unavailable oracle adds 1.84 points overall and 8.05 points on multi-hop. Judge-gated merge changes the recall of text-based evidence from 58.82% to 59.08%, reduces the active store by 1.42%, and incurs 0 observed losses in 100 independently audited merges, with a one-sided 95% upper loss-rate bound of 2.95%. Together, these results outline a practical deployment path: no additional LLM call on the online write path, with merge screening confined to periodic offline consolidation. The lifecycle reduces to one principle: attribute usefulness after use, and screen for preservation before compression.