Measure Before You Manage: Evaluating Agent Working Memory in Coding Agents

2026-08-31

AI Summary

研究通过分析55个编码代理轨迹，提出基于语义异构性的内存管理策略，包括对象感知压缩策略和检索策略，以优化代理工作内存。

Abstract

Agent working memory is heterogeneous. Objects such as instructions, artifacts, tool outputs, and agent-generated state play different semantic roles and exhibit different size, retention, and representation profiles. Recent work has begun to explore memory-management mechanisms that account for such heterogeneity. This work focuses on semantic heterogeneity and studies how it should shape the management and evaluation of working memory in coding agents. Across 55 archived coding-agent trajectories, we find that semantically different working-memory objects exhibit distinct retention and compression behavior. This heterogeneity motivates semantically informed memory management. We study two semantically informed strategies: an object-aware compression policy and a retrieval-based policy. Their evaluation shows that calibration gains may not transfer to held-out tasks, and that equal token budgets do not imply equal delivered context or management cost. A real-system replay further exposes serving limits that nominal budgets alone do not capture. Together, these results show why semantic structure matters for agent working memory and why evaluating memory-management strategies requires more than a nominal token budget. We organize these lessons into four levels: stored state, delivered context, management work, and task or process outcome.

Problem

• agent working memory
• semantic heterogeneity
• memory management
• coding agents

Innovation

• semantic heterogeneity
• working memory
• memory management
• coding agents