Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission1731 Authors

Keywords: Agent Memory, Autonomous Context Management, Reinforcement Learning in Agents

Abstract:

Long-context Large Language Models, despite their expanded capacity, require careful working memory management to mitigate attention dilution during long-horizon tasks. Yet existing approaches rely on external mechanisms that lack awareness of the agent's reasoning state, leading to suboptimal decisions. We propose Memory-as-Action (MemAct), a framework that treats working memory management as learnable policy actions. By formulating context management as in-place editing operations (deletion, insertion), MemAct enables joint optimization of information retention and task performance through end-to-end reinforcement learning. To address the computational challenges of dynamic context updates, we introduce Dynamic Context Policy Optimization, which restores training efficiency without compromising reasoning integrity. Experiments show that MemAct-RL-14B matches the accuracy of models 16× larger while reducing average context length by 51\%, with learned strategies that adapt to model capabilities and generalize across task complexities.
The code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MemAct-Anonymized-CBC3.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: AI/LLM Agents

Research Area Keywords: LLM agents, agent memory, reinforcement learning in agents

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1731