OEP: Poisoning Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Locally Correct but Non-Transferable Experiences

Memory-augmented large language model (LLM) agents use iterative reflection and self-evolution to solve complex tasks, but these mechanisms introduce security risks. Existing agentic memory attacks require privileged access or explicit malicious content, making them detectable by advanced safety filters. This leaves a subtler attack surface underexplored: whether adversaries can induce agent to generate experiences that appear locally correct and semantically plausible yet induce harmful generalization during reflection. We find that reflective agents are vulnerable to such clean experiences, especially when paired with severe but plausible hypothetical consequences. Based on this observation, we introduce Obsessive Experience Poisoning (OEP), a low-privilege black-box attack requiring no direct control over the system prompt or memory database. OEP constructs adversarial clean edge-cases that combine locally correct solutions, non-transferable methods, and severe consequences, biasing reflection toward risk-averse rule formation. During memory consolidation, agents may over-trust self-generated reflections and distill localized experiences into high-priority but over-generalized rules, causing downstream failures. Evaluations across three domains show that OEP achieves ASR above 50\% with GPT-4o agents, and outperforms existing attacks under LLM auditing defense.

E-mem: Multi-agent based Episodic Context Reconstruction for LLM Agent Memory

The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents towards System~2 reasoning, characterized by deliberative, high-precision problem-solving, requires maintaining rigorous logical integrity over extended horizons. However, prevalent memory preprocessing paradigms suffer from destructive de-contextualization. By compressing complex sequential dependencies into pre-defined structures (e.g., embeddings or graphs), these methods sever the contextual integrity essential for deep reasoning. To address this, we propose E-mem, a framework shifting from Memory Preprocessing to Episodic Context Reconstruction. Inspired by biological engrams, E-mem employs a heterogeneous hierarchical architecture where multiple assistant agents maintain uncompressed memory contexts, while a central master agent orchestrates global planning. Unlike passive retrieval, our mechanism empowers assistants to locally reason within activated segments, extracting context-aware evidence before aggregation. Evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that E-mem achieves over 54\% F1, surpassing the state-of-the-art GAM by 7.75\%, while reducing token cost by over 70\%.