LLMs Can't Play Hangman: On the Necessity of a Private Working Memory for Language Agents

Davide Baldelli^1,2,3 Ali Parviz^1,2,3 Amal Zouaq^1,3,4 Sarath Chandar^1,2,3

¹Chandar Research Lab

²Mila – Quebec AI Institute

³Polytechnique Montréal

⁴Lama West Lab

{firstname.lastname}@mila.quebec

Paper

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BibTeX

@misc{baldelli2026llmscantplayhangman,
  title={LLMs Can't Play Hangman: On the Necessity of a Private Working Memory for Language Agents}, 
  author={Davide Baldelli and Ali Parviz and Amal Zouaq and Sarath Chandar},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2601.06973},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06973}, 
}