ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memory

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission21820 Authors

Keywords: LLM Agents, Memory Mechanism, Reasoning, Test-Time Scaling

Abstract: With the growing adoption of large language model (LLM) agents in persistent, real-world roles, they naturally encounter continuous streams of tasks and interactions. A key limitation, however, is their failure to learn from this accumulated experience, forcing them to discard valuable insights and repeat past errors. Unlike prior works that primarily store raw experience or successful routines, we propose ReasoningBank, a novel memory framework that allows an agent to self-curate generalizable reasoning strategies from both its successful and failed experiences for future leverage. This mechanism enables agents to generalize across tasks and become more capable over time. To accelerate and diversify this test-time learning process, we further propose memory-aware test-time scaling (MaTTS), which leverages a powerful synergy between memory and test-time scaling. On one hand, relevant memory from ReasoningBank guides the scaling process toward more effective exploration and improved reliability. On the other, scaling, in both parallel and sequential settings, generates abundant, diverse experiences that provide rich contrastive signals for synthesizing higher-quality memory. Experiments on web browsing and software engineering tasks show that ReasoningBank consistently outperforms existing memory mechanisms in both effectiveness and efficiency, with MaTTS further amplifying the gains. These findings position memory-driven experience as a new dimension of test-time scaling, where emergent behaviors naturally arise and agents acquire self-evolving capabilities.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 21820