What Happens Inside Agent Memory? Circuit Analysis from Emergence to Diagnosis
Agent memory failures are silent: an LLM-based agent can produce a fluent response even when it fails to extract, retain, or retrieve the information needed across sessions. The write-manage-read loop describes the external pipeline of these systems but leaves open which internal computations implement each stage. We trace feature circuits across the Qwen-3 family (0.6B--14B), two memory frameworks (mem0, A-MEM), and a matched Gemma-3 replication, reporting two mechanistic findings plus one deliverable. First, under mem0, control is detectable before content. Routing circuitry is causally active at 0.6B, while content circuitry produces no detectable signal until 4B. Gemma-3 reproduces th...
| Authors | Xutao Mao, Jinman Zhao, Gerald Penn et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 5 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
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