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Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents

Computation and Language 2026-05-21 v1

Abstract

Language agents increasingly operate over streams of related tasks, yet existing memory systems struggle to convert accumulated experience into reusable knowledge. Retrieval-augmented and structured memory methods record per-session observations effectively, but often couple acquisition and consolidation into a single online process, leaving the agent without a global view across sessions to discover recurring patterns, abstract shared procedures, or prune redundant entries. Inspired by complementary learning systems theory, we propose Auto-Dreamer, a learned offline consolidator for language-agent memory. Auto-Dreamer decouples fast per-session memory acquisition from slow cross-session consolidation. Given a selected working region of a typed memory bank, the consolidator treats the region as read-only evidence, performs bounded tool-use to inspect entries and provenance-linked source trajectories, and synthesizes a fresh compact replacement set that abstracts across sessions and supersedes the original region. We train Auto-Dreamer via GRPO, using end-to-end agent performance as the reward signal to learn how to consolidate memories acquired through fast online experience. Trained on ScienceWorld trajectories alone, Auto-Dreamer outperforms fixed, RL-trained, and prompted memory baselines on ScienceWorld by 7 points while using an active memory bank 12×\times smaller than the strongest baseline, and continues to lead on held-out ALFWorld and WebArena without retraining -- using 6×\times less memory than the strongest baseline on ALFWorld.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.20616,
  title  = {Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents},
  author = {Chongrui Ye and Yuxiang Liu and Yu Wang and Haofei Yu and Yining Zhao and Ge Liu and Julian McAuley and Jiaxuan You},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.20616},
  year   = {2026}
}

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Preprint

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:23:03.259Z