Procedural Memory for Language Agents: A Neurosymbolic Perspective on Explicit Goal Structure

Overview & Synopsis

Large language models remain unreliable on long-horizon tasks requiring procedural reasoning. We argue that a key cause is the absence of explicit procedural memory: accessible, modifiable knowledge of how tasks are accomplished, distinct from semantic and episodic memory. Goal-Oriented Graphs offer such a representation, encoding goals and prerequisite dependencies as inspectable symbolic structure. We examine their construction, the challenges they pose, and principles for integrating them with neural reasoning.