Memory Transfer Learning: How Memories are Transferred Across Domains in Coding Agents

Kangsan Kim, Minki Kang, Taeil Kim, Yanlai Yang, Mengye Ren, Sung Ju Hwang


Abstract
Memory-based self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for coding agents. However, existing approaches typically restrict memory utilization to homogeneous task domains, failing to leverage the shared infrastructural foundations, such as runtime environments and programming languages, that exist across diverse real-world coding problems. To address this limitation, we investigate Memory Transfer Learning (MTL) by harnessing a unified memory pool from heterogeneous domains. We evaluate performance across 6 coding benchmarks using four memory representations, ranging from concrete traces to abstract insights. Our experiments demonstrate that cross-domain memory improves average performance by 3.7% over zero-shot setting and even outperforms the strongest self-evolving baseline, primarily by transferring meta-knowledge, such as validation routines, rather than task-specific code. Importantly, we find that abstraction dictates transferability; high-level insights generalize well, whereas low-level traces often induce negative transfer due to excessive specificity. Furthermore, we show that transfer effectiveness scales with the size of the memory pool, and memory can be transferred even between different models. Our work establishes empirical design principles for expanding memory utilization beyond single-domain silos.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2666
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
60677–60697
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2666/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kangsan Kim, Minki Kang, Taeil Kim, Yanlai Yang, Mengye Ren, and Sung Ju Hwang. 2026. Memory Transfer Learning: How Memories are Transferred Across Domains in Coding Agents. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 60677–60697, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Memory Transfer Learning: How Memories are Transferred Across Domains in Coding Agents (Kim et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2666.pdf