Taeil Kim
Author directory2026
Agent Memory Distillation: Empowering Small LLM Agents with Hierarchical Teacher Memory
Taeil Kim | Kangsan Kim | Sung Ju Hwang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Taeil Kim | Kangsan Kim | Sung Ju Hwang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Memory systems have shown promise for improving agent performance, but their potential remains largely unexplored for small language models, which struggle to generate sufficient successful trajectories on their own. We propose Agent Memory Distillation (AMD), a training-free framework that transfers structured knowledge from a large teacher agent to a small student agent through hierarchical memory. AMD constructs three complementary memory types from successful teacher trajectories: Workflow memory encodes task-level strategies, Subtask memory provides concrete behavioral examples at an intermediate granularity, and Function memory captures per-function calling conventions and common pitfalls. Workflow and Subtask memories are injected proactively at the start of each task, while Function memory is retrieved reactively upon tool-calling errors. We evaluate AMD on three tool-use benchmarks using four student models (4B-8B parameters) with GPT-5-mini as the teacher, achieving average accuracy gains of 27.2%, 11.2%, and 3.4% on AppWorld, BFCL V3, and ToolSandbox, while consistently outperforming existing memory-based baselines. Further analysis shows that Subtask memory contributes the largest gains, stronger teachers yield better distillation quality, and 4B-sized students benefit most from memory distillation.
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
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kangsan Kim | Minki Kang | Taeil Kim | Yanlai Yang | Mengye Ren | Sung Ju Hwang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
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.