@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-ocr,
    title = "{OCR}-Memory: Optical Context Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agent Memory",
    author = "Li, Jinze  and
      Zhang, Yang  and
      Yang, Xin  and
      QU, Jiayi  and
      Xu, Jinfeng  and
      Yang, Shuo  and
      Ding, Junhua  and
      Ngai, Edith Cheuk-Han",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.474/",
    pages = "10409--10420",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Autonomous LLM agents increasingly operate in long-horizon, interactive settings where success depends on reusing experience accumulated over extended histories. However, existing agent memory systems are fundamentally constrained by text-context budgets: storing or revisiting raw trajectories is prohibitively token-expensive, while summarization and text-only retrieval trade token savings for information loss and fragmented evidence. To address this limitation, we propose Optical Context Retrieval Memory (**OCR-Memory**), a memory framework that leverages the visual modality as a high-density representation of agent experience, enabling retention of arbitrarily long histories with minimal prompt overhead at retrieval time. Specifically, OCR-Memory renders historical trajectories into images annotated with unique visual identifiers. OCR-Memory retrieves stored experience via a locate-and-transcribe paradigm that selects relevant regions through visual anchors and retrieves the corresponding verbatim text, avoiding free-form generation and reducing hallucination. Experiments on long-horizon agent benchmarks show consistent gains under strict context limits, demonstrating that optical encoding increases effective memory capacity while preserving faithful evidence recovery."
}