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MemMA: Coordinating the Memory Cycle through Multi-Agent Reasoning and In-Situ Self-Evolution

arXiv cs.AI / 3/20/2026

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Key Points

  • MemMA is a plug-and-play multi-agent framework that coordinates the memory cycle for memory-augmented LLM agents, addressing forward construction and retrieval as well as backward repair.
  • On the forward path, a Meta-Thinker provides structured guidance that steers a Memory Manager during memory construction and directs a Query Reasoner during iterative retrieval to enable strategic reasoning.
  • On the backward path, MemMA introduces in-situ self-evolving memory construction, which synthesizes probe QA pairs, verifies the current memory, and converts failures into repair actions before finalization.
  • Extensive experiments on LoCoMo show MemMA consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple LLM backbones and improves three storage backends, with code publicly available.

Abstract

Memory-augmented LLM agents maintain external memory banks to support long-horizon interaction, yet most existing systems treat construction, retrieval, and utilization as isolated subroutines. This creates two coupled challenges: strategic blindness on the forward path of the memory cycle, where construction and retrieval are driven by local heuristics rather than explicit strategic reasoning, and sparse, delayed supervision on the backward path, where downstream failures rarely translate into direct repairs of the memory bank. To address these challenges, we propose MemMA, a plug-and-play multi-agent framework that coordinates the memory cycle along both the forward and backward paths. On the forward path, a Meta-Thinker produces structured guidance that steers a Memory Manager during construction and directs a Query Reasoner during iterative retrieval. On the backward path, MemMA introduces in-situ self-evolving memory construction, which synthesizes probe QA pairs, verifies the current memory, and converts failures into repair actions before the memory is finalized. Extensive experiments on LoCoMo show that MemMA consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple LLM backbones and improves three different storage backends in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ventr1c/memma.