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MemoryTax: The Bitter Lesson of Agent Memory

Zedong Peng · 2026 · arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2610.29823 · cited by 0 works (OpenAlex) · open-access PDF

Portuguese

Sistemas de memória de contexto de agentes como o Mem0 e o Zep decidem o que manter antes de qualquer pergunta chegar; agentes de codificação mantêm o histórico bruto e deixam o modelo pesquisar com suas próprias ferramentas. Perguntamos se a memória projetada ainda ajuda uma vez que o modelo é forte o suficiente para procurar por si mesmo. Em uma conversação LoCoMo (419 voltas, 152 perguntas), executamos quatro métodos de memória (contexto completo, BM25, Mem0, Zep) e três agentes de codificação (Pi, Codex, Claude Code), cada um com GPT-4o-mini, GPT-6 Luna e Claude Opus 5.5, e gravamos o que cada rollout custa. Este é um estudo empírico curto, com uma conversação e uma execução por célula. A memória de ag

Machine translation (Meta M2M100); the English original follows.

Abstract

Agent memory systems such as Mem0 and Zep decide what to keep before any question arrives; coding agents keep the raw history and let the model search it with its own tools. We ask whether designed memory still helps once the model is strong enough to search for itself. On one LoCoMo conversation (419 turns, 152 questions), we run four memory methods (full context, BM25, Mem0, Zep) and three coding agents (Pi, Codex, Claude Code), each with GPT-4o-mini, GPT-6 Luna and Claude Opus 5.5, and record what every rollout costs. This is a short empirical study, with one conversation and one run per cell. Agent memory is a costly patch for a weak model: Mem0 beats full context only with GPT-4o-mini, and its build alone costs more than a whole full-context rollout. Agent memory also has a ceiling, set by the model that writes it: a stronger reader does not recover what a weaker writer left out. With Claude Opus 5.5, Pi tops the cost-accuracy frontier, scoring 99% for less than half the cost of full context; its one miss is a wrong answer key. Part of that lead comes from photo captions that only the agents could read: on the 88 questions whose evidence has no photo, Pi and full context differ by one answer.

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Topics: Conversation, Computer science, Coding (social sciences), Context (archaeology), Ask price, Set (abstract data type)

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