Organizing long-term memory for multimodal agents remains challenging because existing methods either suffer from expensive question-agnostic offline summaries or naive embedding similarity matching that introduces incomplete and redundant context. To address these issues, we propose GraphMemix, a combinatorial-optimization graph memory framework that models memory organization as query-aware evidence-forest construction. Specifically, our method consists of three key components:(1) candidate graph construction, which expands multi-view seed memories through schema and semantic relations to acquire query-aware original context; (2) evidence utility and activation costs, which decouples direct memory support from anchor-conditioned relation verification to suppress redundant or conflicting information; and (3) forest optimization, which jointly selects a forest-format memory context under a maximum evidence budget and its reliable relational structure. By organizing memory into a query-relevant subgraph, the method avoids substantial lifecycle cost and recovers low-similarity complementary evidence. Experimental results across four long-term multimodal memory benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements with different foundation models and establish a new Pareto frontier between accuracy and lifecycle cost.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of GraphMemix in three stages. (1) Candidate graph construction uses multi-view retrieval to identify seeds and bounded relation expansion to expose their local context. (2) Evidence utility and costs combines direct node support with ECV-validated, anchor-conditioned incremental relations. (3) Forest optimization jointly selects nodes and trusted edges under a maximum reader budget, then deterministically serializes the resulting evidence forest.
ATM
Mem-Gallery
MemEye
H2HMem
Avg.
Method
Venue
J.Acc.
EM
J.Acc.
EM
J.Acc.
M.EM
J.Acc.
Recall
J.Acc.
A-MEM
NeurIPS’25
41.86
40.80
52.89
32.61
37.09
40.57
39.94
40.55
42.94
UniversalRAG
ACL’26
43.10
41.19
63.76
32.50
47.98
49.33
44.36
45.04
49.80
MemGuide
AAAI’26
48.47
47.80
48.10
32.73
41.40
44.61
39.94
35.81
44.48
LightMem
ICLR’26
22.70
24.52
38.28
23.20
36.23
39.76
31.04
27.82
32.06
VimRAG
ICML’26
33.81
32.76
48.33
16.13
28.25
28.23
17.89
17.01
32.07
Table 1: End-to-end results with Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, judged by GPT-5-mini. J.Acc. denotes Judge Accuracy (%). Each benchmark additionally reports its representative native metric. Avg. is the macro-average over the four Judge Accuracies.
ATM
Mem-Gallery
MemEye
H2HMem
Avg.
Method
Venue
J.Acc.
EM
J.Acc.
EM
J.Acc.
M.EM
J.Acc.
Recall
J.Acc.
A-MEM
NeurIPS’25
42.43
41.95
50.03
28.40
24.42
30.93
44.20
39.97
40.27
UniversalRAG
ACL’26
49.04
48.18
64.82
32.14
58.17
38.07
48.34
41.31
55.09
MemGuide
AAAI’26
54.98
53.07
48.33
22.85
30.40
36.66
47.98
41.97
45.43
LightMem
ICLR’26
24.33
25.48
33.72
17.01
20.70
30.59
32.80
27.79
27.89
VimRAG
ICML’26
22.51
21.36
46.99
14.14
31.81
34.64
39.00
33.67
35.08
Table 2: End-to-end results with Gemma 4 12B Unified, judged by GPT-5-mini. J.Acc. denotes Judge Accuracy (%). Each benchmark additionally reports its representative native metric. Avg. is the macro-average over the four Judge Accuracies.
Figure 2: Optimization behavior over all 6,592 evaluation questions. (a) Mean improvement in the complete forest objective after accepted 1-swap updates. (b) Mean cumulative structural gain from accepted edges during the exact Kruskal update. Shaded regions are 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3: Full-lifecycle cost and accuracy on ATM-Bench. (a) Estimated time to digest all 11,034 memories once and answer all 1,044 questions once. (b) Judge Accuracy versus the same lifecycle time. GraphMemix lies on the empirical Pareto frontier.
Configuration
MV
Node
ECV
Opt.
ATM
Gallery
MemEye
H2H
Avg.
(a) Embedding Top- K
42.80
62.50
46.70
44.80
49.20
(b) + Multi-view Retrieval
✓
47.40
67.90
49.10
50.00
53.60
(c) + Node Verifier
✓
✓
53.20
73.80
52.20
56.00
58.80
(d) + ECV Reranking
✓
✓
✓
54.00
74.60
52.80
57.40
59.70
(e) + Forest Optimization ( GraphMemix )
✓
✓
✓
✓
55.27
76.33
53.64
60.96
61.55
Table 3: Incremental ablation in Judge Accuracy (%). MV denotes multi-view retrieval and Opt. denotes set-level forest optimization. ECV Reranking uses the strongest verified relation as an independent candidate-level bonus, whereas the final row jointly optimizes the evidence set and its forest.
Dataset
Direct
Recoverable
No Access
ATM-Bench
68.50
15.14
16.35
Mem-Gallery
56.67
37.87
5.46
MemEye
42.08
39.70
18.21
H2HMem
15.61
33.93
50.46
Table 4: Accessibility of gold evidence from source top-10 and the actual bounded candidate graph (%).
Dataset
R.Q.
C.Q.
Share
Count
Rate
ATM-Bench
165
113
68.48%
12.01%
Mem-Gallery
1,142
629
55.08%
19.58%
MemEye
1,256
621
49.44%
19.17%
H2HMem
1,956
784
40.08%
19.01%
Table 5: Question-level recovery of gold evidence with Gemma 4. R.Q. denotes questions with recoverable gold in the candidate graph; C.Q. denotes questions gain recovered gold evidence by GraphMemix . Share is recovered evidence percentage among all retained gold pairs.
Dataset
Fixed Edges
ECV Edges
Fixed/ECV Components
Fixed Hit@10
ECV Hit@10
Gain
ATM-Bench
6.23
0.66
3.77 / 9.34
84.20
87.74
+3.54
Mem-Gallery
7.34
1.47
2.66 / 8.53
94.76
96.59
+1.83
MemEye
6.07
0.25
3.93 / 9.75
85.34
88.89
+3.56
H2HMem
6.75
1.00
3.25 / 9.00
89.46
95.06
+5.60
Table 6: Effect of ECV on coverage and forest sparsity. Edge and component counts are per question.
Joint
Two-Call
Dataset
Acc.
R@10
Acc.
R@10
ATM-Bench
55
76.10
56
81.38
Mem-Gallery
66
64.10
71
71.68
MemEye
54
49.28
59
49.72
H2HMem
62
22.28
59
20.97
Macro Avg.
59.25
52.94
61.25
55.94
Table 7: Separating direct node utility from anchor-conditioned relation verification on random 100-question held-out subset of each benchmark. Accuracy uses the fixed GPT-5-mini judge protocol.
Figure 4: Qualitative evidence optimization on Mem-Gallery.
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Dataset
Contexts
Memories
Media
Experimental Q
Caption source
ATM-Bench
1
11,034
3,759 I + 533 V
1,044
Released derived fields
Mem-Gallery
20
7,944
1,490 I
1,711
Native captions
MemEye
16
3,392
442 I
1,855
Native memory captions
H2HMem
25
7,078
1,300 I
1,982
Qwen3-VL-8B generated
Appendix
Table 8: Dataset scale and actual experimental sample counts. I and V denote image and video assets. Media counts are unique assets in the unified snapshot.
Figure 5: Complete-lifecycle wall-clock estimates for the three benchmarks not shown in the main-paper ATM analysis. Left panels decompose one full memory digest plus one answer for every evaluation question; right panels pair the same estimated wall clock with Qwen3-VL Judge Accuracy. Dashed curves mark the empirical non-dominated envelope among the compared methods.
Figure 14Figure 15Figure 16Figure 17
Selector
ATM-Bench
Mem-Gallery
MemEye
H2HMem
Avg.
Node Utility Top- K
82.27
68.99
58.19
18.04
56.87
MMR
82.27
69.39
57.94
17.76
56.84
Rel.–Red.
82.27
69.12
58.00
17.87
56.82
DPP
76.73
67.12
49.38
17.52
52.69
Facility Location
82.27
68.99
57.80
18.14
56.80
Anchor–Neighbor
82.27
70.43
58.19
18.45
57.33
Appendix
Table 9: Controlled fixed- K evidence selection on four held-out sets with frozen candidates and node utilities. Values are Recall@10 (%); Avg. is the dataset macro-average.
Selector
ATM-Bench
Mem-Gallery
MemEye
H2HMem
Total
Node Utility Top- K
0
0
0
0
0
MMR
0
+2
−2
−6
−6
Rel.–Red.
0
+1
−1
−4
−4
DPP
−3
−4
−16
−13
−36
Facility Location
0
0
−3
+1
−2
Anchor–Neighbor
0
+6
0
+8
+14
Appendix
Table 10: Net low-ranked gold evidence recovered over Node Utility Top- K on recoverable held-out questions. Positive values add gold evidence after accounting for any previously selected gold that is displaced.
Multimodal memory lets AI systems retain, organize, and retrieve information across text, images, audio, and video for long-term reasoning and personalization.
Long-running LLM agents rely on external memory to store and reuse information beyond a single context window, yet there is a fundamental tension between the continuous accumulation of interaction trajectories and the limited context capacity. The key challenge in agent memory is therefore not only to retrieve relevant records, but also to select necessary evidence under a given budget and organize it in an appropriate modality. Existing memory readout methods mainly use textual or visual forms. Text preserves high fidelity, but its linear token representation makes contents with different importance compete for the limited context at nearly uniform unit cost. Visual readout renders text into document-like images, which can use two-dimensional layouts to expose structure and emphasize key information, but it may lose fine-grained details during rendering and compression. To address this issue, we propose MEMO, a multimodal evidence memory organization method for LLM agents. MEMO first uses a trained evidence extractor to select relevant memory blocks and form evidence units with source information and presentation requirements. A trained query-conditioned memory manager assigns each unit to a textual, visual, or dual-channel carrier and selects a layout that matches the evidence structure. A deterministic memory construction module then generates the textual package and visual pages. The memory manager is trained with feedback from an offline reader that measures the utility of the guided memory plan, so that retention and presentation decisions align with downstream usage. We evaluate MEMO on four benchmarks, HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, LoCoMo, and ALFWorld, with multiple reader backends. The results show that MEMO presents memory more efficiently with fewer memory tokens, improves downstream task performance, and builds more effective working memory under constrained budgets.
Xian Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Jiacheng Ruan +3
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Tsinghua University · Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Long-term memory has been widely adopted in LLM-based agents to support persistent interaction and personalized assistance. Long-term multi-party interactions, however, accumulate substantially more detailed information, with decisions repeatedly updated and states evolving across participants and interaction stages. Temporal structure is therefore crucial for tracing such memories: relevant information often appears densely within short intervals, while transitions among different states are anchored by a strict temporal order. Existing temporally aware memory frameworks primarily store time as metadata or use temporal signals to guide retrieval over preconstructed memory structures, without using temporal structure to both recover locally concentrated evidence and reconstruct its complete event progression. To address these limitations, we propose T-Mem, a temporal-structure-based memory framework that preserves interactions and organizes query-relevant evidence through two temporal mechanisms. Temporal Evidence Discovery exploits the local concentration of related messages to recover overlooked evidence, while Temporal Memory Structuring models state transitions and supporting relations over time and compresses low-information spans within the resulting forest. Evidence Forest Linearization then serializes the structured evidence for answer generation. Experiments on two long-term multi-party memory benchmarks demonstrate that T-Mem consistently outperforms competitive memory frameworks across LLMs, parameter settings, domains, and query types.
Junyou Guo, Chongyang Tao, Yan He +2
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Alibaba Group
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.
Jingyu Sun, Yan Lin, Yuyang Xue +10
The University of Manchester · The University of Newcastle · The University of Edinburgh +5