| title | MemoryAthena: Adaptive Routing over Latent and Generated Memories |
|---|---|
| authors | Mingyuan Li, Guangsheng Yu, Juyuan Zhang, Xu Wang, Zhibo Man, Haonan Zhang, Shaoxiong Ji |
| date | 2026-09-22 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2609.25853 |
| affiliation | Omni Language AI Research |
| upvotes | 12 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf code |
| primer | Memory for AI agents |
| abstract | Learned-memory methods store information in an explicit table and consume it through a separate reader, allowing addressing, storage, and reading to be modified independently. We study whether useful memory can also be generated rather than only retrieved. MemoryAthena uses three pathways: direct Engram retrieval (E), generation from retrieved Engram cues (GE), and generation from causal backbone states without consulting the memory table (GH). Generated memory is conditionally useful: it can complement E in one context but interfere with it in another. MemoryAthena therefore treats E as an anchor and learns when a generated representation should intervene. With the backbone, memory, generators, and readers frozen, a lightweight causal routing head is trained from counterfactual future-token likelihood advantages of GE and GH relative to E. At inference time, an admitted candidate modifies the E residual through bounded interpolation, while rejection recovers the direct pathway exactly. On question answering, MemoryAthena raises the five-task average from 37.65 to 39.28 over the direct pathway of the same checkpoint, while the six-task general-NLP average increases from 76.73 to 79.13. The complete memory-side system contains approximately 201M parameters, excluding the frozen backbone. Further analyses show complementary strengths among E, GE, and GH across tasks and inputs. These results support generated memory as a selective correction to direct retrieval and highlight routing when, which, and how strongly to intervene as the central challenge. |
cite
@misc{li2026memoryathena,
title={MemoryAthena: Adaptive Routing over Latent and Generated Memories},
author={Mingyuan Li and Guangsheng Yu and Juyuan Zhang and Xu Wang and Zhibo Man and Haonan Zhang and Shaoxiong Ji},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.25853},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25853}
}