EvoGraph-Mem: Failure-Aware Editable Graph Memory for Long-Term Language Agents

Abstract

Long-term memory is essential for language agents operating across extended interactions and evolving tasks. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly focus on storing and retrieving past experience, but the quality of stored memories may degrade over time. In particular, previously distilled insights can become outdated, over-generalized, or harmful under new task contexts, causing memory pollution when repeatedly reused. To address this issue, we study insight-level memory maintenance for long-term language agents and propose a failure-aware memory maintenance framework based on an editable insight graph. Each insight node tracks positive evidence, negative evidence, and an activation state, enabling the agent to distinguish reusable insights from conflicting or invalid ones. We further introduce a utility-aware retrieval mechanism and a graph controller that updates the memory graph after task execution by keeping reliable insights, archiving invalid ones, revising outdated ones, and adding newly discovered reusable insights. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms representative memory-based agent baselines across different backbone models. Ablation studies further demonstrate that append-only memory is insufficient for long-horizon tasks, while evidence-aware retrieval and graph-level editing improve memory reliability and downstream task performance.