LANTERN: Layered Archival and Temporal Episodic Retrieval Network for Long-Context LLM Conversations

Long-term memory is the missing layer for LLM agents: across sessions they forget, and the common workaround -- replaying the whole history into the prompt -- is expensive, slow, and, as distractors accumulate, less accurate. Most memory systems win on cost or latency but still lose to the full-context baseline on accuracy, and benchmark numbers are reported on inconsistent, non-reproducible harnesses, so one system appears at wildly different scores across sources. We present Engram, an open-source, dual-process memory engine on a bi-temporal data model. A fast write path appends lossless episodes with no LLM on the critical path; an asynchronous path extracts atomic (subject, predicate, object) facts, builds a bi-temporal knowledge graph, and resolves contradictions without an LLM call per fact -- invalidating, never deleting, so every fact keeps provenance and a supersession chain. A hybrid read path fuses dense, lexical, graph, and recency/salience signals, applies a point-in-time ("as-of") filter, and assembles a compact, provenance-tagged context. On the full 500-question LongMemEval_S, graded by the official category-specific judge, Engram's lean configuration -- answering from a ~9.6k-token retrieved slice, never the full history -- scores 83.6% vs. 73.2% for full-context (+10.4 points, McNemar p < 10^-6) at ~8x fewer tokens (9.6k vs. 79k), with 0/500 errored. The gain needs a hybrid read path: facts alone lose recall, while facts plus retrieved chunks recover detail. We also contribute a neutral, in-repo evaluation harness with the official judge baked in and the full-context baseline in every table, publish the raw per-question logs, and document the measurement-integrity pitfalls (truncation, home-grown judges, full-history leaks) that silently distort memory benchmarks. Every number ships with a command to reproduce it.

When a user reveals task-critical information across several conversation turns, LLM accuracy drops by up to 65% despite full context availability. We show that this Lost in Conversation degradation can be substantially mitigated by training models to maintain a compact rolling memory instead of attending to a growing history. To make such training scalable, we introduce a low-cost sharding pipeline that converts single-turn QA datasets into multi-turn fragmented-information episodes, eliminating the need for hours of manual annotation. Training only on sharded GSM8K, our memory-augmented policy significantly improves multi-turn accuracy and generalises zero-shot to harder math and out-of-domain long-context QA. Moreover, memory-trained models outperform full-history baselines even when given the full history at test time, suggesting that learning to compress induces more robust incremental reasoning than full-context exposure alone.

Large language models (LLMs) process long contexts, including long documents and lengthy conversations, but face token-level memory usage that increases proportionally to input length. Although model optimization and lossy prompt compression are widely used, these methods still fail to solve the long-context recall problem beyond pretrained and size-constrained context windows. This paper proposes a long-context recall method that maintains near-constant GPU memory usage as context length increases, without additional training. The main idea is to reconstruct facts using parameter activations in the LLM's feed-forward layers, which store residual vectors representing facts from the source document. Utilizing residual vectors allows the LLM to deterministically reconstruct query relevant facts without referencing the original document, preserving high fidelity and reducing memory usage without fine-tuning weights. Experimental results show that the proposed method enables answering single-fact questions in two-million-token story contexts where previous methods fail.