Learning to Remember: Advances in Memory Mechanisms for Large Language Models

Overview & Synopsis

Memory has become a central mechanism for extending large language models (LLMs) beyond fixed context windows, stateless interaction, and static parametric knowledge. This survey organizes the literature around three complementary dimensions: the life cycle of memory, the storage substrate, and the system role that memory plays in LLM-based agents, while using cognitive-science-inspired memory concepts as a lightweight conceptual motivation rather than as a separate technical contribution or implementation family. On this basis, we distinguish three mechanism families: nonparametric memory, where information is stored outside model parameters in text, graph, multimodal, or database-like structures; parametric memory, where information is stored or accessed through activations, key-value caches, learned modules, adapter-based parameterizations, or model weights; and memory for agent evolution, where stored experiences support reinforcement learning, continual learning, procedural reuse, context engineering, and agent harness design. Evaluation is treated as a separate cross-cutting component rather than as a memory mechanism. Unlike surveys that focus primarily on retrieval-augmented generation or long-context modeling, this paper emphasizes the full memory life cycle: construction, maintenance, retrieval, consolidation, forgetting, governance, and evaluation. By aligning conceptual motivations, computational memory mechanisms, benchmarks, and deployment concerns, the survey provides a structured roadmap for designing memory-augmented LLM agents that are persistent, adaptive, auditable, and safe to update over time.