Beyond Retrieval: Analytic Memory for Multimodal Agents
Authors: Zhoujin Tian, Hao Zhang, Yao Tian, Cheng Chen, Yakun Li, Lei Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou
Organizations: HKUST · ByteDance
Abstract
Long-term multimodal memory must support not only retrieving relevant information but also computing over observations accumulated across interactions. Existing systems largely emphasize \emph{retrieval memory}, organizing interaction histories through summaries and indexes to return query-relevant information at multiple granularities, from high-level abstractions to underlying records. In this paper, we formulate \emph{analytic memory} as a complementary abstraction that organizes recurring multimodal observations into queryable structures supporting filtering, aggregation, ranking, and temporal comparison. We present AdaMM, a framework that jointly supports retrieval and analytic memory. Rather than relying on application-defined schemas, AdaMM extracts provenance-linked attribute-value observations from dialogue, images, and contextual metadata, discovers recurring field structures, and materializes them for analytical access. At inference time, a memory-aware planner decomposes queries into retrieval and analytic operations and routes each operation to the appropriate tools. Experiments on two long-term multimodal memory benchmarks, MemEye and MemGallery, show that AdaMM improves performance by up to 11.3% and 6.9%, respectively.
Long-term memory is essential for LVLM agents to maintain consistency and integrate information across extended multimodal interactions. Existing agent memory systems, however, often reduce visual experiences into textual summaries or rely on static retrieve-then-reason pipelines, which are inefficient at query time and brittle when questions require image-text binding, temporal updates, or visual details. We propose Prospective Multimodal Memory Compilation, a framework that shifts part of the memory reasoning process from query time to memory consolidation time. Given accumulated multimodal interactions, a Questioner predicts future question candidates, a Planner compiles question-conditioned multimodal memory programs, and a Doubter verifies whether the planned evidence path can support the predicted answer. The verified question-program pairs form a structured question bank for efficient query-time routing and evidence retrieval. Experiments on multimodal long-term memory benchmarks show that our method improves answer quality and visual evidence recall while reducing query-time token and latency costs. Extensive ablations analyze the effects of self-feedback, dynamic planning, raw-image access, and question bank coverage.
Language agents are increasingly deployed over accumulating multimodal information, yet existing benchmarks assume a human-human form with sparse visuals and straightforward content, evaluating neither reasoning over authentic multimodal file interaction nor the interpretation of concealed user information. We therefore introduce M3Exam, a query-centric multimodal conversational memory benchmark built on realistic user-agent interaction, with multi-dimensional evaluation spanning cross-modal grounding and implicit information inference. Benchmarking MLLMs and memory systems reveals persistent gaps in cross-modal grounding, cross session reasoning, and the efficiency cost of accumulating multimodal context. We further propose M3Proctor, a multimodal memory method that detects query modality bias and consumes raw visual sources only on demand, improving accuracy by 13% while cutting index-construction time and retrieved tokens by over 70%.
Existing multimodal long-term memory agents use external memory to overcome the limited context available for long videos. However, most methods emphasize what to store rather than how stored memory should be retrieved. When retrieval becomes inaccurate or repeatedly fails to obtain useful evidence, existing agents lack mechanisms to diagnose failures from previous task trajectories and adapt future search strategies.We introduce Reflective Retrieval Memory (RRM), a reflective memory framework for long-horizon multimodal reasoning. RRM augments an entity-centric multimodal memory graph with reflective experience memory, which distills transferable procedural retrieval knowledge from historical task trajectories. Unlike episodic and semantic memories that preserve factual evidence from the current video, reflective experience memory captures reusable search strategies across tasks. RRM converts retrieved experiences into query-level guidance, while answer generation remains conditioned only on factual evidence newly retrieved from the current video. A lifecycle management mechanism further regulates experience memory through usage frequency, reuse feedback, and temporal decay, thereby reducing redundancy and noise. RRM consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on M3-Bench-Robot, M3-Bench-Web, and Video-MME-Long, demonstrating the effectiveness of reflective retrieval memory for long-horizon multimodal reasoning.