Look Back to Reason Forward: Revisitable Memory for Long-Context LLM Agents

Abstract

Large language models face challenges in long-context question answering, where key evidence of a query may be dispersed across millions of tokens. Existing works equip large language models with a memory corpus that is dynamically updated during a single-pass document scan, also known as the "memorize while reading" methods. While this approach scales efficiently, it suffers from irreversible forward-only processing, information loss through overwriting, and sparse reinforcement learning signals. To tackle these challenges, we present ReMemR1, a memory-augmented agent with callback-enhanced memory that allows selective retrieval from the entire memory history and allows non-linear reasoning and revisiting of early evidence. To further strengthen training, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Level Rewards (RLMLR), which combines final-answer rewards with dense, step-level signals that guide effective memory use. Together, these contributions mitigate information degradation, improve supervision, and support multi-hop memory utilizing. Experiments on long-document QA show significant gains over existing memory-based approaches, which validates ReMemR1 as an effective solution for long-context reasoning agents.

Cite

Text

Shi et al. "Look Back to Reason Forward: Revisitable Memory for Long-Context LLM Agents." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

Markdown

[Shi et al. "Look Back to Reason Forward: Revisitable Memory for Long-Context LLM Agents." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.](https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/shi2026iclr-look/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{shi2026iclr-look,
  title     = {{Look Back to Reason Forward: Revisitable Memory for Long-Context LLM Agents}},
  author    = {Shi, Yaorui and Chen, Yuxin and Wang, Siyuan and Li, Sihang and Cai, Hengxing and Gu, Qi and Wang, Xiang and Zhang, An},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/shi2026iclr-look/}
}