MEMO: Memory-Augmented Model Context Optimization for Robust Multi-Turn Multi-Agent LLM Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Yunfei, Wang, Kevin, Cheng, Bobby, Yao, Jianzhu, Sha, Zhizhou, Duffy, Alexander, Xi, Yihan, Mei, Hongyuan, Tan, Cheston, Wei, Chen, Viswanath, Pramod, Wang, Zhangyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866912973455360000
author Xie, Yunfei
Wang, Kevin
Cheng, Bobby
Yao, Jianzhu
Sha, Zhizhou
Duffy, Alexander
Xi, Yihan
Mei, Hongyuan
Tan, Cheston
Wei, Chen
Viswanath, Pramod
Wang, Zhangyang
author_facet Xie, Yunfei
Wang, Kevin
Cheng, Bobby
Yao, Jianzhu
Sha, Zhizhou
Duffy, Alexander
Xi, Yihan
Mei, Hongyuan
Tan, Cheston
Wei, Chen
Viswanath, Pramod
Wang, Zhangyang
contents Multi-turn, multi-agent LLM game evaluations often exhibit substantial run-to-run variance. In long-horizon interactions, small early deviations compound across turns and are amplified by multi-agent coupling. This biases win rate estimates and makes rankings unreliable across repeated tournaments. Prompt choice worsens this further by producing different effective policies. We address both instability and underperformance with MEMO (Memory-augmented MOdel context optimization), a self-play framework that optimizes inference-time context by coupling retention and exploration. Retention maintains a persistent memory bank that stores structured insights from self-play trajectories and injects them as priors during later play. Exploration runs tournament-style prompt evolution with uncertainty-aware selection via TrueSkill, and uses prioritized replay to revisit rare and decisive states. Across five text-based games, MEMO raises mean win rate from 25.1% to 49.5% for GPT-4o-mini and from 20.9% to 44.3% for Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, using $2,000$ self-play games per task. Run-to-run variance also drops, giving more stable rankings across prompt variations. These results suggest that multi-agent LLM game performance and robustness have substantial room for improvement through context optimization. MEMO achieves the largest gains in negotiation and imperfect-information games, while RL remains more effective in perfect-information settings. All code is open-source and available here: https://github.com/openverse-ai/MEMO
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_09022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MEMO: Memory-Augmented Model Context Optimization for Robust Multi-Turn Multi-Agent LLM Games
Xie, Yunfei
Wang, Kevin
Cheng, Bobby
Yao, Jianzhu
Sha, Zhizhou
Duffy, Alexander
Xi, Yihan
Mei, Hongyuan
Tan, Cheston
Wei, Chen
Viswanath, Pramod
Wang, Zhangyang
Artificial Intelligence
Multi-turn, multi-agent LLM game evaluations often exhibit substantial run-to-run variance. In long-horizon interactions, small early deviations compound across turns and are amplified by multi-agent coupling. This biases win rate estimates and makes rankings unreliable across repeated tournaments. Prompt choice worsens this further by producing different effective policies. We address both instability and underperformance with MEMO (Memory-augmented MOdel context optimization), a self-play framework that optimizes inference-time context by coupling retention and exploration. Retention maintains a persistent memory bank that stores structured insights from self-play trajectories and injects them as priors during later play. Exploration runs tournament-style prompt evolution with uncertainty-aware selection via TrueSkill, and uses prioritized replay to revisit rare and decisive states. Across five text-based games, MEMO raises mean win rate from 25.1% to 49.5% for GPT-4o-mini and from 20.9% to 44.3% for Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, using $2,000$ self-play games per task. Run-to-run variance also drops, giving more stable rankings across prompt variations. These results suggest that multi-agent LLM game performance and robustness have substantial room for improvement through context optimization. MEMO achieves the largest gains in negotiation and imperfect-information games, while RL remains more effective in perfect-information settings. All code is open-source and available here: https://github.com/openverse-ai/MEMO
title MEMO: Memory-Augmented Model Context Optimization for Robust Multi-Turn Multi-Agent LLM Games
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09022