Graph-Based Personalized Memory for LLM Agents: Representation, Evolution, Retrieval, and Evaluation
Authors: Dac Duy Anh Nguyen, Zhangchi Qiu, Shigeng Chen, Alan Wee-Chung Liew
Abstract
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are evolving from single-session tools toward long-term personal assistants that must adapt to individual users across tasks, contexts, and interactions. This shift makes memory a core requirement for personalization, since user preferences, goals, constraints, relationships, and past experiences are accumulated gradually and often change over time. Graph-based personalized memory provides a structured way to model such user information through explicit relations, temporal context, and evidence links. Such representations can model not only what an agent remembers about a user but also how memories are connected, revised, and retrieved to support personalized decisions. However, existing work remains fragmented across personalized agents and generic graph memory frameworks, making it difficult to understand the design space as a whole. This survey develops a lifecycle-oriented view of graph-based personalized memory for LLM agents. We organize existing studies around memory representation, memory evolution, memory retrieval, and memory evaluation. We further compare key design choices, discuss current evaluation practices, and open challenges in building reliable long-term personalized agents. This survey aims to clarify how graph-based memory can support adaptive, controllable, and user-centric LLM agents.
Large Language Models (LLMs) lack persistent memory for long-term personalized conversations. Existing graph-based memory systems suffer from information dilution, absent provenance tracking, and uniform retrieval that ignores query context. We introduce MemORAI (Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence), a framework that integrates three innovations: selective memory filtering with dual-layer compression to retain user-persona-relevant content, a provenance-enriched multi-relational graph tracking factual origins at the turn level, and query-adaptive subgraph retrieval with Dynamic Weighted PageRank that applies query-conditioned edge weighting. Evaluated on LOCOMO and LongMemEval benchmarks, MemORAI achieves state-of-the-art performance in memory retrieval and personalized response generation, demonstrating that selective storage, enriched representation, and adaptive retrieval are essential for coherent, personalized LLM agents.
Existing large language model (LLM) based memory systems apply universal, static policies that overlook a fundamental reality: the contexts that are worth storing in memory are different across users. This misalignment wastes limited memory budget on transient interactions while failing to preserve critical context for long horizon tasks. To address this gap, we investigate an underexplored question: can LLM based memory systems learn personalized memory policies? We introduce PerMemBench, the first benchmark for evaluating personalized memory systems, featuring multi year, multi domain interaction histories across diverse user personas. We further present the first empirical study of memory personalization, proposing session level storage gating, a lightweight framework that selectively bypasses memory operations for transient sessions. Our study confirms that personalization yields substantial retention gains under perfect gating, yet reveals that accurate gating remains an open and critical challenge.
Long-term personalized dialogue agents must track user preferences as their personas evolve. Existing memory systems organize past events well, but store personas as flat profiles detached from the events that justify them. This loose coupling leads to the memory-persona validity gap and the persona-aware retrieval gap. We propose PGMem, a heterogeneous persona-memory graph that connects event and persona nodes through typed provenance and evidence edges, keeping each persona signal traceable to the events that support or revise it. At retrieval time, PGMem expands from query-relevant seeds and ranks signals by evidential validity. Across three benchmarks with small language model backbones, PGMem consistently outperforms summary-based, persona-aware, graph-structured, and agentic memory baselines, and improves performance as the context grows. The source code of PGMem is available at https://github.com/wonjunchoi23/pgmem/