ConMem: Contribution-Aware Memory for Long-Horizon Manufacturing Inspection Logs
Authors: Bingchen Liu, Yuanyuan Fang, Lei Liu, Guangyuan Dong, Xing Fu, Yuanyuan Gao, Shuyue Wei, Xin Li, +1 more
Abstract
Long-horizon steel-equipment inspection requires reasoning over heterogeneous records accumulated across repeated inspection cycles. Existing retrieval-augmented generation systems treat historical logs as a static corpus and retain records without estimating their diagnostic value, failing to report early risk. To this end, we propose ConMem, a contribution-aware memory framework for LLM-assisted equipment inspection, supporting a human-in-the-loop early-risk screening system. Specifically, our ConMem first segments inspection logs into functional evidence units, then estimates each memory unit's contribution to downstream diagnosis through a Shapley-style estimation, and finally retains high-value evidence under a constrained memory budget. In experiments, we evaluate ConMem on real-world dataset and ConMem achieves 76.0% QA accuracy, exceeding the strongest directly comparable baseline. Relative to the naive 8K-context LLM baselines, it reduces the average number of input tokens by 88.2% and response time by 86.6%. Ablation studies also show that the functional-role-aware segmentation and contribution-based valuation are helping prioritize weak degradation signals for targeted field inspection. Practical deployments further confirm that ConMem retains the weak early signal across three inspection cycles, providing an early-stage seal-wear alert targeted for on-site inspectors.
Long-term LLM agents must preserve information across interactions while distinguishing repeated evidence, historical states, updates, and unresolved contradictions. Existing textual memory systems retrieve semantically relevant memories efficiently but often leave these relationships implicit, whereas richer structured approaches model them through global graphs, hierarchical abstractions, or reflection at greater complexity. We introduce MemoryLACE (MemLACE), a lightweight memory framework that explicitly models the lifecycle of textual evidence through sparse merge, supersession, and contradiction relations while preserving atomic natural-language memories and their provenance. Rather than retrieving memories independently, MemLACE reconstructs relation-aware evidence units that expose current, historical, supporting, and conflicting evidence for downstream reasoning. Across BEAM and StructMemEval, using open-weight and proprietary LLM backbones, MemLACE achieves the highest overall performance in same-backbone comparisons while reducing end-to-end runtime on BEAM by 66.6% relative to Hindsight, the strongest reported reflective-memory baseline. Ablation studies identify lifecycle expansion and temporal awareness as the principal contributors to these gains. Together, the results demonstrate that explicitly modeling the local lifecycle of textual evidence is sufficient to substantially improve long-term memory reasoning without requiring comprehensive knowledge graphs or global reflection.
Long-term memory is essential for LLM-based agents to sustain interactions and reliably leverage distant history. However, existing memory systems typically process heterogeneous dialogue content through a uniform summarization and retrieval pipeline, leading to either excessive token consumption or irreversible loss of fine-grained evidence. We argue that historical dialogue content should be handled differently according to its compressibility, temporal dynamics, and fidelity requirements. Based on this insight, we propose LeanMem, a lightweight long-term memory framework. LeanMem first filters out low-value content, then stores informative segments as compact profile memory, temporally structured event memory, or source-grounded record memory, depending on the nature of the information. During maintenance, only dynamically evolving event memories are selectively updated, avoiding redundant consolidation of stable profiles and immutable records. During inference, LeanMem dynamically selects memory types and allocates retrieval budgets according to query-specific evidence demands, assembling relevant evidence on demand. On LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S with GPT-4.1-mini and Qwen3-8B, LeanMem improves accuracy over the strongest memory-based baseline in every setting, by up to 15.1 points, at the lowest or near-lowest construction cost, inference tokens, and latency. The code and datasets are included in the supplementary materials.
Recent LLM-based agent systems continuously accumulate context across multi-turn interactions, tool invocations, and cross-session workflows. Replaying the full history for every request quickly becomes impractical: long contexts increase prefill cost, may exceed context limits, and often bury task-relevant evidence in irrelevant content, degrading both serving efficiency and output quality. We propose Akashic, a low-overhead memory system built around MemAttention, which organizes context into bounded chunks and models semantic relationships across chunks, preserving cross-chunk evidence without repeatedly rewriting the full history. Akashic further applies hardware-software co-designed memory placement to co-locate likely co-retrieved chunks, reducing retrieval fragmentation and I/O overhead. Across four representative workloads and three model sizes, Akashic improves task accuracy by up to 10.2 points, throughput by up to 1.21x, and sustainable request rate by up to 1.88x over strong prior memory baselines.