MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission24167 Authors

Keywords: deep research, reasoning, context compression

TL;DR: We propose a RL-based learning framework that enables interactive agents to solve long-horizon tasks with constant context

Abstract: Modern language agents often need to solve tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-turn interactions, where they retrieve external information, adapt to observations, and answer interdependent queries. Yet, most LLM systems rely on full-context prompting, appending all past turns regardless of their relevance. This leads to un-bounded memory growth, increased computational costs, and degraded reasoning performance on out-of-distribution input lengths due to LLM forgetting the context. We introduce MEM1, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that enables agents to operate with constant context size when solving long multi-turn tasks. At each turn, MEM1 updates a compact shared internal state that jointly supports memory consolidation and reasoning. Leveraging reinforcement learning (RL) and rollout trajectory truncation, we train a MEM1 agent to develop internal states that integrate prior memory with new observations from the environment while strategically discarding irrelevant or redundant information. Experiments across three domains, including internal retrieval QA, open-domain web QA, and multi-turn web shopping, show that MEM1-7B improves performance by 3.5$\times$ while reducing memory usage by 3.7$\times$ compared to Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on an augmented multi-hop QA dataset with 16 objectives in each task, and generalizes beyond the training horizon. Our results demonstrate the promise of reasoning-driven memory consolidation as a scalable alternative to existing solutions for training long-horizon task-solving agents that involve multiple interactions, where both efficiency and performance are optimized.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 24167