Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificity
Menglin Xia, Xuchao Zhang, Shantanu Dixit, Paramaguru Harimurugan, Rujia Wang, Victor Ruehle, Robert A Sim, Chetan Bansal
Abstract
Agent memory systems must accommodate continuously growing information while supporting efficient, context-aware retrieval for downstream tasks. Abstraction is essential for scaling agent memory, yet it often comes at the cost of specificity, obscuring the fine-grained details required for effective reasoning. We introduce Memora, a harmonic memory representation that structurally balances abstraction and specificity. Memora organizes information via its *primary abstractions* that index concrete memory values and consolidate related updates into unified memory entries, while *cue anchors* expand retrieval access across diverse aspects of the memory and connect related memories. Building on this structure, we employ a retrieval policy that actively exploits these memory connections to retrieve relevant information beyond direct semantic similarity. Theoretically, we show that standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Knowledge Graph (KG)-based memory systems emerge as special cases of our framework. Empirically, Memora establishes a new state-of-the-art on the LoCoMo and LongMemEval benchmarks, demonstrating better retrieval relevance and reasoning effectiveness as memory scales.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
xia2026memora,
title={Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificity},
author={Menglin Xia and Xuchao Zhang and Shantanu Dixit and Paramaguru Harimurugan and Rujia Wang and Victor R{\"u}hle and Robert Sim and Chetan Bansal and Saravan Rajmohan},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=zSrvkj0ers}
}