Collaborative Memory: Multi-User Memory Sharing in LLM Agents with Dynamic Access Control

Complex tasks are increasingly delegated to ensembles of specialized LLM-based agents that reason, communicate, and coordinate actions—both among themselves and through interactions with external tools, APIs, and databases. While persistent memory has been shown to enhance single-agent performance, most approaches assume a monolithic, single-user context—overlooking the benefits and challenges of knowledge transfer across users under dynamic, asymmetric permissions. We introduce Collaborative Memory, a framework for multi-user, multi-agent environments with asymmetric, time-evolving access controls encoded as bipartite graphs linking users, agents, and resources. Our system maintains two memory tiers: (1) private memory—private fragments visible only to their originating user; and (2) shared memory—selectively shared fragments. Each fragment carries immutable provenance attributes (contributing agents, accessed resources, and timestamps) to support retrospective permission checks. Granular read policies enforce current user–agent–resource constraints and project existing memory fragments into filtered transformed views. Write policies determine fragment retention and sharing, applying context-aware transformations to update the memory. Both policies may be designed conditioned on system, agent, and user-level information. Our framework enables safe, efficient, and interpretable cross-user knowledge sharing, with provable adherence to asymmetric, time-varying policies and full auditability of memory operations.