Compiled Memory: Not More Information, but More Precise Instructions for Language Agents

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 12 Mar 2026] Compiled Memory: Not More Information, but More Precise Instructions for Language Agents James Rhodes, George Kang Existing memory systems for language agents address memory management: how to retrieve and page more information within a context budget. We address a complementary problem -- memory utility: what experience is worth keeping, and how it should change agent behavior. We present Atlas, a memory kernel that compiles accumulated task experience into an agent's instruction structure -- without fine-tuning, RAG, or human intervention. Memory is distillation, not storage; delivery is instruction rewriting, not context injection. Facts extracted from agent failures and successes are verified through a three-step promotion gate and delivered by rewriting the agent's system prompt with learned sub-bullets. On CUAD contract analysis, the evolved prompt improves GPT-4o token-level F1 by +8.7pp and precision by +12.5pp. On HotpotQA multi-hop QA, joint F1 improves +3.16pp. An ablation isolates the mechanism's defining property -- the training signal constraint: the evolved prompt learns exactly what it is taught, and nothing more. Applied to Claude Sonnet~4.5 using the same evolved prompt -- compiled from GPT-4o errors, unchanged -- joint F1 improves +2.31pp, with gains concentrating where Claude's stronger baseline leaves the most room -- confirming that the compiled knowledge is task-shaped, not model-shaped. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.15666 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.15666v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.15666 Focus to learn more Submission history From: James Rhodes [view email] [v1] Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:49:43 UTC (12 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 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?)