Memory Makes Models Worse: MemTrapBench Finds Every Memory Framework Tested Underperforms No Memory at All, Best Case Still Down 10%+

arXiv (via HuggingFace Daily Papers, 24 upvotes)·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

MemTrapBench (arXiv 2608.20202, submitted 2026-08-20, Zhejiang-affiliated team led by Mengru Wang and Ningyu Zhang) isolates what the authors call memory-induced cognitive traps, where correctly stored and contextually relevant memories still corrupt reasoning through Reasoning Fixation and Belief Distortion. Across two model families and five memory frameworks, every strategy scored below the no-memory baseline, with the strongest methods still dropping more than 10%. Their proposed fix, AdaptiveMem, is inference-time only and preserves scores on standard memory benchmarks — worth reading before you bolt a memory layer onto an agent on the assumption that more context is free.