{"id":1169040,"date":"2026-04-20T09:50:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T16:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/mstar-every-task-deserves-its-own-memory-harness\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T12:17:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T19:17:33","slug":"mstar-every-task-deserves-its-own-memory-harness","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/mstar-every-task-deserves-its-own-memory-harness\/","title":{"rendered":"M$^star$: Every Task Deserves Its Own Memory Harness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Large language model agents rely on specialized memory systems to accumulate and reuse knowledge during extended interactions. Recent architectures typically adopt a fixed memory design tailored to specific domains, such as semantic retrieval for conversations or skills reused for coding. However, a memory system optimized for one purpose frequently fails to transfer to others. To address this limitation, we introduce M$^star$, a method that automatically discovers task-optimized memory harnesses through executable program evolution. Specifically, M$^star$ models an agent memory system as a memory program written in Python. This program encapsulates the data Schema, the storage Logic, and the agent workflow Instructions. We optimize these components jointly using a reflective code evolution method; this approach employs a population-based search strategy and analyzes evaluation failures to iteratively refine the candidate programs. We evaluate M$^star$ on four distinct benchmarks spanning conversation, embodied planning, and expert reasoning. Our results demonstrate that M$^star$ improves performance over existing fixed-memory baselines robustly across all evaluated tasks. Furthermore, the evolved memory programs exhibit structurally distinct processing mechanisms for each domain. This finding indicates that specializing the memory mechanism for a given task explores a broad design space and provides a superior solution compared to general-purpose memory paradigms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Large language model agents rely on specialized memory systems to accumulate and reuse knowledge during extended interactions. Recent architectures typically adopt a fixed memory design tailored to specific domains, such as semantic retrieval for conversations or skills reused for coding. However, a memory system optimized for one purpose frequently fails to transfer to others. To 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