@inproceedings{roh-etal-2026-clag,
    title = "{CLAG}: Adaptive Memory Organization via Agent-Driven Clustering for Small Language Model Agents",
    author = "Roh, Taeyun  and
      Jang, WonJune  and
      Jung, Junha  and
      Kang, Jaewoo",
    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.824/",
    pages = "16707--16726",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large language model agents heavily rely on external memory to support knowledge reuse and complex reasoning tasks. Yet most memory systems store experiences in a single global retrieval pool which can gradually dilute or corrupt stored knowledge. This problem is especially pronounced for small language models (SLMs), which are highly vulnerable to irrelevant context. We introduce CLAG, a CLustering-based AGentic memory framework where an agent actively organizes memory. CLAG employs an SLM-agent driven router to assign each new memory to a semantically coherent cluster. By performing continual evolution within the cluster, it effectively reduces cross-topic interference. During the retrieval phase, CLAG targets a small set of relevant clusters for retrieval, thereby excluding distractors and reducing the search space. Experiments on multiple QA datasets with three SLM backbones show that CLAG consistently improves answer quality and robustness over prior memory systems for agents, remaining lightweight and efficient."
}