Memory in the Loop: In-Process Retrieval as Extended Working Memory for Language Agents

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.05690v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language agents run a loop - observe, reason, act - but the memory they reason over sits outside it: a store queried at most once per turn. We study the regime where memory moves inside the loop, read and written on every step. The obstacle has always been latency: networked stores answer in tens to hundreds of milliseconds, and in-loop retrieval can inflate end-to-end latency by up to 83x when retrieval is expensive. Prior work manages that cost rather than questioning it: serving-layer scheduling hides it, "memory-first" designs ration retrieval to once per turn. We argue latency is a property of where the store lives, not the in-loop pattern: an in-process store answers in ~100us, three orders of magnitude below the network regim