ActiveMem: Distributed Active Memory for Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 9 Jun 2026] ActiveMem: Distributed Active Memory for Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning Yunhan Jiang, Wenbin Duan, Shasha Guo, Liang Pang, Xiaoqian Sun, Huawei Shen Memory is essential for enabling large language model (LLM) agents to handle long-horizon reasoning tasks. Existing memory mechanisms are largely centralized, typically organizing retrieved information and interaction history within a single model context. This design imposes a fundamental trade-off: scaling reasoning trajectories risks context overload, whereas aggressive content pruning may result in irreversible information loss. Seeking a better trade-off, we draw inspiration from human cognitive systems, especially the functional complementarity between the prefrontal cortex (executive control) and the hippocampus (memory management), suggesting that such a trade-off need not be inherent, but may instead stem from centralized memory organization. To this end, we propose ActiveMem, a heterogeneous framework that decouples agent memory from the core reasoning process. Specifically, a high-level Planner utilizes distilled semantic gists to execute reasoning, while a lightweight, distributed memory system operates in parallel to actively accumulate and consolidate these gists throughout the task. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus and GAIA show that ActiveMem achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly reduced overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of distributed active memory for long-horizon reasoning. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.10532 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.10532v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.10532 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yunhan Jiang [view email] [v1] Tue, 9 Jun 2026 08:03:38 UTC (903 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)