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HFEPX · Eval paper review

CoMem: Learning to Anticipate Failures from Retrieved Experience

Yun Shen, Ming Shen, Tianjun Yao

Published

Oct 19, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

15% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Oct 19, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Weak or implicit
Validate from full paper
Usefulness for eval research
0/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure. Cross-task reflective memory addresses this in two forms: retrieved memory keeps past experience explicit and looks up related cases, which is specific but bounded by the bank, and parametric memory internalizes experience into parameters, which generalizes but is grounded in nothing beyond the task description. When both are used, existing agents combine them additively, feeding their outputs to the solver side by side, so retrieved experience never changes what the learned memory produces. We introduce CoMem (Compounding Memory), which makes retrieved experience an input to the learned memory itself, at training and at inference. The agent builds a bank of its own successful and failed reflections, learns from retrieved cases to write failure hypotheses, candidate explanations of how an attempt is likely to go wrong, and at test time reasons from newly retrieved cases to guide each attempt. Varying the retrieved cases gives the memory different perspectives, yielding reflective diversity that is not merely sampled but also grounded in retrieved experience. Across two backbones and five benchmarks in math, code, and multi-hop QA, CoMem achieves strong overall performance. Additional evaluations show that it generalizes to out-of-distribution tasks and enables smaller models to provide effective guidance to stronger solvers.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
Math, Coding
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
None
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure.
  • Cross-task reflective memory addresses this in two forms: retrieved memory keeps past experience explicit and looks up related cases, which is specific but bounded by the bank, and parametric memory internalizes experience into parameters, which generalizes but is grounded in nothing beyond the task description.
  • When both are used, existing agents combine them additively, feeding their outputs to the solver side by side, so retrieved experience never changes what the learned memory produces.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against others mentioning MATH.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure.
  • When both are used, existing agents combine them additively, feeding their outputs to the solver side by side, so retrieved experience never changes what the learned memory produces.
  • We introduce CoMem (Compounding Memory), which makes retrieved experience an input to the learned memory itself, at training and at inference.

Why it matters for eval

  • Reflection lets LLM agents improve from their own attempts, but the memory it builds is local to a single task, so an agent reflecting on its own tends to revisit the same explanation for failure.
  • When both are used, existing agents combine them additively, feeding their outputs to the solver side by side, so retrieved experience never changes what the learned memory produces.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.