Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Xing, Wang, Guanghui, Cui, Yanwei, Qiu, Wei, Li, Ziyuan, Zhu, Bing, He, Peiyang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhang, Xing
Wang, Guanghui
Cui, Yanwei
Qiu, Wei
Li, Ziyuan
Zhu, Bing
He, Peiyang
author_facet Zhang, Xing
Wang, Guanghui
Cui, Yanwei
Qiu, Wei
Li, Ziyuan
Zhu, Bing
He, Peiyang
contents As LLM agents scale to long-horizon, multi-session deployments, efficiently managing accumulated experience becomes a critical bottleneck. Agent memory systems and agent skill discovery both address this challenge -- extracting reusable knowledge from interaction traces -- yet a citation analysis of 1,136 references across 22 primary papers reveals a cross-community citation rate below 1%. We propose the \emph{Experience Compression Spectrum}, a unifying framework that positions memory, skills, and rules as points along a single axis of increasing compression (5--20$\times$ for episodic memory, 50--500$\times$ for procedural skills, 1,000$\times$+ for declarative rules), directly reducing context consumption, retrieval latency, and compute overhead. Mapping 20+ systems onto this spectrum reveals that every system operates at a fixed, predetermined compression level -- none supports adaptive cross-level compression, a gap we term the \emph{missing diagonal}. We further show that specialization alone is insufficient -- both communities independently solve shared sub-problems without exchanging solutions -- that evaluation methods are tightly coupled to compression levels, that transferability increases with compression at the cost of specificity, and that knowledge lifecycle management remains largely neglected. We articulate open problems and design principles for scalable, full-spectrum agent learning systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_15877
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agents
Zhang, Xing
Wang, Guanghui
Cui, Yanwei
Qiu, Wei
Li, Ziyuan
Zhu, Bing
He, Peiyang
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multiagent Systems
As LLM agents scale to long-horizon, multi-session deployments, efficiently managing accumulated experience becomes a critical bottleneck. Agent memory systems and agent skill discovery both address this challenge -- extracting reusable knowledge from interaction traces -- yet a citation analysis of 1,136 references across 22 primary papers reveals a cross-community citation rate below 1%. We propose the \emph{Experience Compression Spectrum}, a unifying framework that positions memory, skills, and rules as points along a single axis of increasing compression (5--20$\times$ for episodic memory, 50--500$\times$ for procedural skills, 1,000$\times$+ for declarative rules), directly reducing context consumption, retrieval latency, and compute overhead. Mapping 20+ systems onto this spectrum reveals that every system operates at a fixed, predetermined compression level -- none supports adaptive cross-level compression, a gap we term the \emph{missing diagonal}. We further show that specialization alone is insufficient -- both communities independently solve shared sub-problems without exchanging solutions -- that evaluation methods are tightly coupled to compression levels, that transferability increases with compression at the cost of specificity, and that knowledge lifecycle management remains largely neglected. We articulate open problems and design principles for scalable, full-spectrum agent learning systems.
title Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15877