The Memory Curse: How Expanded Recall Erodes Cooperative Intent in LLM Agents
Context window expansion is often treated as a straightforward capability upgrade for LLMs, but we find it systematically fails in multi-agent social dilemmas. Across 7 LLMs and 4 games over 500 rounds, expanding accessible history degrades cooperation in 18 of 28 model--game settings, a pattern we term the memory curse. We isolate the underlying mechanism through three analyses. First, lexical analysis of 378,000 reasoning traces associates this breakdown with eroding forward-looking intent rather than rising paranoia. We validate this using targeted fine-tuning as a cognitive probe: a LoRA adapter trained exclusively on forward-looking traces mitigates the decay and transfers zero-shot ...
| Authors | Jiayuan Liu, Tianqin Li, Shiyi Du et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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