What Must Generalist Agents Remember?
Khurram Yamin, Namrata Deka, Maitreyi Swaroop, Albert Ting, Jeff Schneider, Bryan Wilder
Abstract
This paper develops a formal account of what generalist agents must store in memory in order to act near-optimally across multiple environments and goals. It shows that when two domains share an observational bottleneck but require incompatible optimal actions, any uniformly near-optimal policy must induce distinct memory distributions at that bottleneck. The result yields a separation theorem: sufficiently successful agents cannot rely only on current state observations, but must preserve domain-relevant information in memory. The paper further shows that if an agent's memory contains enough information to estimate values for related goals, then that memory can be used to approximately reconstruct the agent's local transition dynamics. Together, these results characterize memory as the substrate that supports domain disambiguation, transition-model reconstruction, and planning for generalist agents.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.