@omarsar0
// The Memory Curse in LLM Agents // (bookmark it) Long histories apparently degrades agents as they become increasingly history-following and risk-minimizing. Across 7 LLMs and 4 social dilemma games over 500 rounds, expanding accessible history degraded cooperation in 18 of 28 model–game combinations. They call it the memory curse. Lexical analysis of 378,000 reasoning traces shows the mechanism: it's not that agents become paranoid, it's that forward-looking intent erodes. Long histories pull the model into reasoning about past slights instead of future payoffs. A LoRA adapter trained only on forward-looking traces mitigates the decay and transfers zero-shot to new games. Memory sanitization, keeping prompt length fixed but swapping in synthetic cooperative records, restores cooperation, proving the trigger is content, not length. And ablating explicit Chain-of-Thought often reduces the collapse, meaning deliberation actively amplifies the curse. Paper: https://t.co/aHLDZ9kmlJ Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: https://t.co/1e8RZKs4uX