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cs.AI,cs.LG · 2608.07169 · 2026-08-07

Agent Memory Distillation: Empowering Small LLM Agents with Hierarchical Teacher Memory

Taeil Kim,Kangsan Kim,Sung Ju Hwang
TL;DR:Agent Memory Distillation:训练-free 地把大 teacher agent 的结构化记忆蒸馏给小 student agent,workflow/state/reflection 三种互补记忆类型,让小模型从不会自己生成成功轨迹也能干活。

🎯 问题

记忆系统对提升 agent 表现有潜力,但小语言模型很少被研究——它们自己难以产生足够多的成功轨迹来支撑记忆学习。

🔬 方法

AMD 训练-free 框架:从 teacher 的成功轨迹构建三种互补记忆——Workflow memory、State memory、Reflection memory,分层组织后注入小模型上下文(检索-注入)。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
1 Introduction
2 Related Work
2.1 LLM Agents with Memory
2.2 Knowledge Distillation in LLM
3 Agent Memory Distillation
3.1 Problem Formulation
3.2 Hierarchical Memory Generation
3.3 Memory Retrieval and Injection
4 Experiment
4.1 Experimental Setup

📊 结果

小模型 agent 用 teacher 记忆后任务表现显著提升;消融显示三种记忆各有分工,teacher 规模、检索数、记忆表示都影响效果。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
Memory systems have shown promise for improving agent performance, but their potential remains largely unexplored for small language models, which struggle to generate sufficient successful trajectories on their own. We propose Agent Memory Distillation (AMD), a training-free framework that transfers structured knowledge from a large teacher agent to a small student agent through hierarchical memory. AMD constructs three complementary memory types from successful teacher trajectories: Workflow memory encodes task-level strategies, Subtask memory provides concrete behavioral examples at an intermediate granularity, and Function memory captures per-function calling conventions and common pitfalls. Workflow and Subtask memories are injected proactively at the start of each task, while Function memory is retrieved reactively upon tool-calling errors. We evaluate AMD on three tool-use benchmarks using four student models (4B-8B parameters) with GPT-5-mini as the teacher, achieving average accuracy gains of 27.2%p, 11.2%p, and 3.4%p on AppWorld, BFCL V3, and ToolSandbox, while consistently outperforming existing memory-based baselines. Further analysis shows that Subtask memory contributes the largest gains, teacher effectiveness depends on both teacher capability and student compatibility, and 4B-sized students benefit most from AMD.
Deep Read · 2026-08-11高松灯 / Agent 日报
AgentMemoryDistillationSmall-Model