MemCog: From Memory-as-Tool to Memory-as-Cognition in Conversational Agents

Long-term user memory is essential for personalized conversational agents, yet many memory systems still expose memory through passive retrieval interfaces, making the model a consumer of pre-selected evidence. We introduce NapMem, a framework for learning to use long-term user memory as a structured action space rather than passively retrieved context. NapMem organizes user history into a linked multi-granularity memory pyramid, where raw conversations, typed memory records, topic tracks, and user profiles are connected through provenance relations, and exposes these levels through memory tools. The agent is trained to select memory according to the query and intermediate evidence, allowing it to inspect different memory granularities before answering. Experiments on PersonaMem-v2, LongMemEval, and LoCoMo show that a NapMem agent trained with memory-tool reinforcement learning is competitive across diverse memory-intensive tasks, while evaluations on non-memory tasks suggest that the learned policy largely preserves general reasoning and tool-use abilities. Additional analyses examine storage, inference cost, tool-use behavior, and ablations over navigation, memory granularity, and RL training. Our results suggest that long-term user memory benefits from coupling structured storage with a learned policy for using memory at the appropriate granularity.

Large language models (LLMs) are increas- ingly deployed as long-horizon conversational agents, motivating growing interest in mem- ory systems. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate memory through QA-style probing rather than in-situ conversational usage. We introduce LOCOMO-CONV, a conversa- tional memory benchmark derived from Lo- CoMo with four query styles: dialog, implicit, counterfactual, and composed. Across five rep- resentative memory systems, we evaluate both retrieval recall and end-to-end response qual- ity. Our experiments show that conversational framing exposes substantial retrieval gaps over- looked by QA benchmarks, especially on im- plicit and composed queries, which multi-facet query rewriting narrows for raw-turn mem- ory but not abstractive memory. We further find that strong retrieval does not fully trans- late into response quality, and that implicit queries exhibit silent grounding, where mem- ory improves contextual grounding without ex- plicitly surfacing the gold fact. These results point to reasoning-based memory elaboration as a promising direction, and we release aux- iliary supportive_memory annotations captur- ing conversationally useful context beyond the original gold evidence.

Extraction at ingestion is the wrong primitive for agent memory: content discarded before the query is known cannot be recovered at retrieval time. We propose True Memory, a six-layer architecture that shifts the center of the system from a storage schema to a multi-stage retrieval pipeline operating over events preserved verbatim. The full system runs as a single SQLite file on commodity CPU with no external database, vector index, graph store, or GPU. On LoCoMo (1,540 questions across 10 multi-session conversations), True Memory Pro reaches 93.0% accuracy (3-run mean) against 61.4% for Mem0, 65.4% for Supermemory, approximately 71% for Zep, and 94.5% for EverMemOS under a matched gpt-4.1-mini answer model. On LongMemEval (500 questions), True Memory Pro reaches 87.8% (3-run mean). On BEAM-1M (700 questions at the 1-million-token scale), True Memory Pro reaches 76.6% (3-run mean), above the prior published result of 73.9% for Hindsight. A 56-configuration ablation shows a 1.3-percentage-point spread within the top-performing configuration family.