MemFail: Stress-Testing Failure Modes of LLM Memory Systems
The paper introduces MemFail, a diagnostic benchmark designed to stress-test the failure modes of memory systems in large language models (LLMs). It formalizes memory systems into three operations: summarization, storage, and retrieval, and identifies potential failure modes for each. The authors evaluate four state-of-the-art memory systems using five datasets tailored to assess specific operations, providing insights into the trade-offs of different memory architectures.
- ▪MemFail is a benchmark aimed at understanding failure modes in LLM memory systems.
- ▪The benchmark formalizes memory systems into summarization, storage, and retrieval operations.
- ▪Five datasets were constructed to test specific operations of memory systems.
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2605.26667 (cs) [Submitted on 26 May 2026] Title:MemFail: Stress-Testing Failure Modes of LLM Memory Systems Authors:Ishir Garg, Neel Kolhe, Dawn Song, Xuandong Zhao View a PDF of the paper titled MemFail: Stress-Testing Failure Modes of LLM Memory Systems, by Ishir Garg and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to remain consistent across long-horizon interactions, but little empirical work has been done to understand the specific failure modes and design choices that these systems present.
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