@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-samem,
    title = "{SAM}em: State-Aware Memory as a Fine-Grained Memory for {LLM} Agents in Decision-Making",
    author = "Wang, Tong  and
      Xu, Pei  and
      Cao, Shiyue  and
      Yang, Likun  and
      Li, Daipeng  and
      Jiao, Jianbin  and
      Huang, Kaiqi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.722/",
    pages = "14691--14710",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Existing LLM-based agents primarily utilize coarse-grained experiential memory, where experiences are retrieved based on global task or scene context. While effective in simple settings, such coarse-grained memory lacks the situational alignment required for complex multi-step decision-making. As a result, recalled experiences often fail to match the agent{'}s current state, blurring reasoning focus and leading to inaccurate decisions at critical steps. To this end, we propose State-Aware memory(SAMem), a new fine-grained memory paradigm for LLM agents that explicitly aligns memory retrieval with the current state. Instead of storing and reusing globally shared experiences, SAMem organizes memory at the level of state-specific reasoning thoughts, enabling the agent to retrieve only the most relevant experience for the current decision context. This state-conditioned memory allows the agent to focus on the most informative reasoning cues at each step, rather than being distracted by task-level but state-misaligned guidance. Extensive experiments on complex decision-making benchmarks demonstrate that SAMem outperforms existing experiential memory approaches, achieving superior performance and substantially improved task-solving efficiency. These results indicate that state-aware, fine-grained memory enhances the decision-making capabilities of LLM agents."
}