Reasoning over infinitely long documents is becoming a reality with recurrent memory agents.
However, increasing context length exacerbates the trade-off between reasoning performance and inference efficiency.
Inspired by Kahneman's account of fast and slow thinking, we propose MemDuet, a dual-process memory framework that learns to coordinate a small language model for fast, parallel evidence selection from raw context chunks (System 1) with a large language model for memory-update verification and memory updates in document order (System 2).
We train MemDuet in three stages: supervised fine-tuning of System 1 for evidence selection, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) of System 2 for verification and memory rewriting, and joint optimization of both policies to coordinate selection and updating for long-context reasoning.
Experiments on diverse long-context reasoning benchmarks (RULER-HQA, LongBench v2, and 2WikiMultiHopQA) demonstrate a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off as context length grows.
Averaged across evaluation settings on the three datasets, MemDuet achieves an end-to-end inference speedup of 9.74x and an output-token reduction of 73.91% relative to RL-MemAgent.