More Memory, Worse Agents: Error Reproduction and Anti-Persistence in LLM Agents

Abstract

LLM agents can improve across tasks without updating model parameters by storing experience from their own executions in external memory and reusing it to guide later decisions. A central design question is whether to retain only observed trajectories and outcomes or also the rules, summaries, and skills inferred from them. Retaining these abstractions allows agents to reuse strategies without repeatedly deriving them from raw trajectories. However, errors in stored abstractions can propagate to subsequent decisions through retrieval and reuse. They can also shape execution trajectories, which then become the basis for new abstractions that reproduce the original errors. We term this feedback mechanism error reproduction: errors are regenerated through a cycle of abstraction, execution, and re-abstraction, extending their persistence beyond direct reuse of the original faulty knowledge. We propose Anti-Persistence, a memory design that accumulates trajectories and outcomes while reconstructing task-specific guidance on demand. An adaptive selector uses prior outcomes to decide whether and how to synthesize guidance, which is discarded after execution. This prevents its direct reuse as a stored object, although indirect feedback through retained trajectories remains possible. Across different benchmarks and backbones, Anti-Persistence achieves higher overall held-out success and the lowest average LLM-call cost among the evaluated memory designs. These results support separating experience accumulation from abstraction persistence in memorybased self-improvement.