Memory-augmented agents maintain compact user profiles throughout extended conversations, enabling personalized and consistent responses without the need to process the entire dialogue history. The quality of these user profiles relies on the underlying memory management strategy: at each step, the agent must determine what to retain, compress, or discard. However, existing methods typically employ a static, one-size-fits-all strategy established before training. In practice, the optimal memory decision is inherently user-specific and dynamically evolves alongside policy optimization. To address this, we propose HiPS (Hierarchical Personalized Strategy), a framework that decouples memory management into a globally shared foundation and a user-specific adaptive tier. Specifically, HiPS employs Universal Strategy to extract shared principles from cross-persona trajectories, alongside Persona Delta Distillation to generate tailored rules for users whose behaviors diverge from general patterns. Cross-Level Rule Flow dynamically calibrates their boundary by promoting broadly validated personal rules and demoting contradicted global ones. The architecture establishes a co-evolution loop where a mechanism guarantees that all strategy refinements are anchored to task outcomes. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over memory-augmented baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Same conversation, different users, different needs. A shared strategy (left) applies identical rules to all users, losing Maria’s emotional context while over-preserving Alex’s trivial details. A hypothetical per-user independent approach (center) would redundantly rediscover universal rules and fail on cold-start users. HiPS (right) decomposes the strategy into a shared level and per-user adaptive level.
Figure 2: HiPS framework overview. Universal Strategy Distillation (USD) evolves shared strategies Su from cross-persona trajectories. Persona Delta Distillation (PDD) evolves per-user adaptations Δp for users whose divergence exceeds θdiv . Cross-Level Flow promotes widely validated deltas to Su . The active strategy Sp=Su∪Δp is injected into the agent prompt via submodular selection.
Method
PersonaMem
PrefEval
PersonaBench
PERMA
32K
128K
Expl.
Impl.
0
0.3
0.5
0.7
C-S
C-M
N-S
N-M
Long Context
42.17
20.74
32.40
25.90
27.77
22.38
19.45
12.59
24.11
22.88
24.82
22.81
RAG
52.41
38.02
47.40
32.40
32.21
29.13
25.28
23.36
51.63
36.84
51.77
35.09
Mem0
48.53
39.67
57.60
46.40
17.43
18.95
19.31
16.49
52.76
51.67
51.49
51.15
A-Mem
55.42
39.88
62.30
52.80
30.09
28.52
25.81
24.10
53.05
53.73
52.91
49.87
LightMem
52.41
36.74
64.20
54.80
19.14
17.83
19.61
17.51
59.43
55.53
59.43
55.53
Table 1: Overall comparison across twelve evaluation settings. PersonaMem (32K/128K) is in-domain; PrefEval (Explicit/Implicit), PersonaBench (4 noise levels), and PERMA (C-S/C-M/N-S/N-M denote Clean/Noise × Single/Multi-Domain) are out-of-domain. Higher is better. Best results are in bold .
PersonaMem
PERMA
Configuration
32K
128K
C-S
C-M
N-S
N-M
HiPS (Full)
73.49
62.01
66.95
56.56
63.83
56.30
w/o Flow
71.08
60.49
45.39
40.87
43.12
36.50
w/o Gate
69.28
59.63
51.63
44.99
52.62
46.79
w/o USD
66.27
53.70
61.28
51.93
60.14
49.10
w/o PG
67.47
52.22
60.70
51.41
59.43
53.98
Table 2: Ablation results on PersonaMem and PERMA. Cell color intensity indicates drop from Full ( < 3 to ≥ 15 pp). Rows ordered by average drop.
Figure 3: Evolution of Su evidence distribution and accuracy throughout training on PersonaMem.
Figure 4: Per-persona impact of persona-specific strategies ( Δp ). We compare Full HiPS (with Δp ) against w/o PDD (without Δp ) on PersonaMem 128K. PDD yields an average improvement of +6.0%, benefiting 20 personas. However, the gains are highly heterogeneous: P15 (finance enthusiast) gains +18.6%, while P6 (marketing specialist) suffers -3.3%. We highlight four representative personas to illustrate why.
Method
Qwen2.5-7B Instruct
GPT-4o -mini
Gemini 2.5 flash
GPT-5
RAG
52.41
51.58
60.83
63.74
A-Mem
55.42
55.91
62.74
65.93
▼ Optimized w/ Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
HiPS ( Su only)
57.83
56.74
64.25
67.18
HiPS ( Su + Δp )
61.24
59.83
67.45
70.16
▼ Optimized w/ GPT-4o-mini
Table 3: Cross-model transferability of strategies (without RL policy). Strategies are distilled with one LLM and injected into others’ prompts for inference.
Figure 5: Scaling analysis on PersonaMem (128K). We increase the total dialogue tokens (each evolution round processes 4K tokens) and report the resulting memory bank size (left) and memory evolving time (right).
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Statistic
PersonaMem
Tokens per history
~32k
~128k
~1M
# QA pairs
589
2727
2674
# Sessions per history
10
20
60
Avg. # utterances
167.1
758.3
3607.9
Appendix
Table 4: Statistics of the PersonaMem dataset at different context lengths. Token counts denote the approximate total context length per interaction history; utterance counts are averaged over histories.
Statistic
Value
Explicit queries
1,000
Implicit queries
1,000
Maximum inserted conversations
24
Maximum inserted turns
326
Avg. turns / conversation
13.58
Total tokens
108,102
Appendix
Table 5: Dataset statistics for PrefEval multiple-choice classification.
User
Queries
Corpus
Conv.
AI
E-com.
1
48
110
84
23
3
2
43
90
78
8
4
3
42
64
51
12
1
4
46
85
71
14
0
5
44
84
59
21
4
6
40
94
79
14
1
Appendix
Table 6: Statistics of the PersonaBench subset across six users. Corpus is the sum of Conv. , AI , and E-com. .
Table 7: Comprehensive statistics of the dataset across multiple dimensions. The table summarizes user demographics for profiles, followed by statistics for the base (comparing Clean and Noise) and the style-aligned long-context dataset. Note: For User Demographics Profile (P), Gender: M (Male), F (Female); Education: Grad. (Graduate Degree), Univ. (University); Country codes follow ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. In Interaction Statistics, # denotes the count, and (k) represents thousands of tokens.
Method
Recall facts
Suggest ideas
Latest prefs
Prefs evolve
Update reasons
Aligned recs
New Scenarios
Overall
▼ 32K memory corpus data
Long Context
41.38
22.22
-
42.22
72.41
33.33
26.67
42.17
RAG
37.93
22.22
-
64.44
86.21
60.00
33.33
52.41
Mem0
47.93
19.41
-
46.61
79.58
57.04
42.75
48.53
A-Mem
45.71
18.52
-
73.33
79.31
66.67
33.33
55.42
LightMem
47.06
12.90
-
66.19
75.76
38.18
24.56
52.41
Appendix
Table 8: Category-wise accuracy (%) on PersonaMem under 32K and 128K interaction histories. “–” indicates the category is not available in the dataset.
Method
Travel
Entertain
Lifestyle
Shop
Education
Professional
Pet
Overall
▼ Explicit Memory
Long Context
33.90
42.30
37.80
24.10
24.70
23.70
8.00
32.40
RAG
48.50
55.90
52.40
40.30
40.60
38.00
25.90
47.40
Mem0
60.10
64.00
62.30
49.70
53.20
50.20
38.70
57.60
A-Mem
63.90
69.20
65.60
56.70
56.80
55.50
43.30
62.30
LightMem
66.10
70.90
67.20
59.30
57.50
56.30
47.00
64.20
Appendix
Table 9: Domain-wise accuracy (%) on PrefEval multiple-choice classification under Explicit vs. Implicit preference.
Hyperparameter
Symbol
Value
Universal Strategy Distillation (USD)
USD distillation frequency
K1
20
Distillation trajectories per cycle
k
5
Trajectory buffer size
—
50
Promotion threshold
θval
0.1
Demotion threshold
θrev
0.02
Appendix
Table 10: Hyperparameter settings used for HiPS strategy co-evolution.
Figure 6: Parameter sensitivity analysis of HiPS on the PersonaMem 128K benchmark. The red stars indicate the selected default values. From top-left to bottom-right, the subplots demonstrate the impact on prediction accuracy of the USD frequency K1 , PDD frequency K2 , strategy token budget B , divergence threshold θdiv , flow threshold θflow , validation threshold θval , revision threshold θrev , and quality weight λ .
Figure 7: The complete prompt template used for Universal Strategy Distillation.
Figure 8: The complete prompt template used for Persona Delta Distillation.
While long-term memory is essential for intelligent agents to maintain consistent historical awareness, the accumulation of extensive interaction data often leads to performance bottlenecks. Naive storage expansion increases retrieval noise and computational latency, overwhelming the reasoning capacity of models deployed on constrained personal devices. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Memory Orchestration (HMO), a framework that organizes interaction history into a three-tiered directory driven by user-centric contextual relevance. Our system maintains a compact primary cache, coupling recent and pivotal memories with an evolving user profile to ensure agent reasoning remains aligned with individual behavioral traits. This primary cache is complemented by a high-priority secondary layer, both of which are managed within a global archive of the full interaction history. Crucially, the user persona dictates memory redistribution across this hierarchy, promoting records mapped to long-term patterns toward more active tiers while relegating less relevant information. This targeted orchestration surfaces historical knowledge precisely when needed while maintaining a lean and efficient active search space. Evaluations on multiple benchmarks achieve state-of-the-art performance. Real-world deployments in ecosystems like OpenClaw demonstrate that HMO significantly enhances agent fluidity and personalization.
Junming Liu, Yifei Sun, Weihua Cheng +4
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China · The City University of New York, New York, USA
As LLM-based agents are increasingly used in long-term interactions, cumulative memory is critical for enabling personalization and maintaining stylistic consistency. However, most existing systems adopt an ``all-or-nothing'' approach to memory usage: incorporating all relevant past information can lead to Memory Anchoring, where the agent is trapped by past interactions, while excluding memory entirely results in under-utilization and the loss of important interaction history. We show that an agent's reliance on memory can be modeled as an explicit and user-controllable dimension. We first introduce a behavioral metric of memory dependence to quantify the influence of past interactions on current outputs. We then propose Steerable Memory Agent, SteeM, a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance, ranging from a fresh-start mode that promotes innovation to a high-fidelity mode that closely follows interaction history. Experiments across different scenarios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional prompting and rigid memory masking strategies, yielding a more nuanced and effective control for personalized human-agent collaboration.
Muzhao Tian, Zisu Huang, Xiaohua Wang +8
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory to support long-horizon interaction, personalized assistance, and multi-step reasoning. However, existing memory systems still face three core challenges: they often rely too heavily on semantic similarity, which can miss evidence crucial for user-centric understanding; they frequently store related experiences as isolated fragments, weakening temporal and causal coherence; and they typically use static memory granularities that do not adapt well to the requirements of different questions. We propose AdaMem, an adaptive user-centric memory framework for long-horizon dialogue agents. AdaMem organizes dialogue history into working, episodic, persona, and graph memories, enabling the system to preserve recent context, structured long-term experiences, stable user traits, and relation-aware connections within a unified framework. At inference time, AdaMem first resolves the target participant, then builds a question-conditioned retrieval route that combines semantic retrieval with relation-aware graph expansion only when needed, and finally produces the answer through a role-specialized pipeline for evidence synthesis and response generation. We evaluate AdaMem on the LoCoMo and PERSONAMEM benchmarks for long-horizon reasoning and user modeling. Experimental results show that AdaMem achieves state-of-the-art performance on both benchmarks. The code will be released upon acceptance.