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arXiv · 2510.12635

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

Yuxiang Zhang·Jiangming Shu·Ye Ma·Xueyuan Lin·Shangxi Wu·Jitao Sang
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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 $16\times$ larger while reducing average context length by 51\%, with learned strategies that adapt to model capabilities and generalize across task complexities.

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Yuxiang Zhang, Jiangming Shu, Ye Ma, Xueyuan Lin, Shangxi Wu, Jitao Sang. 2025-10-14. Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12635

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