MemFail: Stress-Testing Failure Modes of LLM Memory Systems
MemFail, introduced in a new arXiv paper (2605.26667v1), is a benchmark designed to stress-test failure modes of LLM memory systems. Unlike existing benchmarks that report aggregate accuracy, MemFail isolates failures in three canonical operations: summarization, storage, and retrieval. It comprises five datasets across four tasks, adversarially crafted to probe specific operations. The authors evaluated four state-of-the-art memory systems, demonstrating how MemFail can empirically reveal tradeoffs in system architectures. This allows developers to attribute incorrect answers to specific failure modes rather than treating memory systems as black boxes. The benchmark is publicly available, providing a tool for improving long-horizon consistency in LLM agents.
Enables targeted debugging of LLM memory failures for more reliable long-horizon agents.