AMemOps: Evaluating Memory Updates in Long Audio Streams

Spoken conversational systems must recover information from prior interactions (i.e., memory), yet relevant information in speech extends beyond what was said to who said it, how it was spoken, and what was audible, information that exists only in the audio signal and cannot be recovered from a transcript. Beyond what to remember, memory also demands diverse operations: retrieving a single fact, integrating evidence across turns, tracking an evolving state. Real interactions further unfold across sessions, meaning information accumulates across distinct episodes rather than a single continuous recording. Existing benchmarks fall short on all three dimensions: they focus primarily on lexical content, adopt limited and ad hoc memory operations, and treat memory as a single-session problem. We argue that principled memory evaluation requires jointly characterizing the acoustic evidence to be retained and the operations applied to it, and introduce a taxonomy along these two axes. Building on this taxonomy, we present VoxMem: 3,196 evaluation instances over 34,743 spoken sessions (177 hours) crossing four acoustic evidence types (speech semantics, speaker identity, paralinguistic cues, environmental sound) with four memory operations (information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal tracking, and answer refusal), grounded in multi-session histories and stratified across context budgets from 8K to 64K tokens. Evaluating 15 LALMs, no model exceeds 40% at 32K. Models retain what was said far better than who said it, how, or what was audible, a gap that widens for complex operations, grows with history length, and manifests as qualitatively distinct failure modes across evidence types. VoxMem aims to provide a foundation to measure and drive progress on the full scope of spoken conversational memory.

Large audio language models (LALMs) process both speech and environmental acoustic cues, yet struggle to retain non-speech information across multi-turn interactions. The performance gap between semantic (speech) and acoustic (non-speech) understanding remains poorly understood, and the underlying mechanisms of representation and retrieval are still unclear. This work introduces EnvMem, a controlled multi-turn benchmark designed to study this gap and identify the root causes of failures at the representation (i.e., latent embeddings) and retrieval levels (i.e., attention allocation). We further conduct post-hoc interventions to probe representational structure and attention dynamics. Our results reveal representational trajectory drift as the key failure mode, while showing that attention allocation plays a limited role in explaining the observed degradation. Overall, we provide a systematic framework for analyzing and improving non-linguistic memory in long-context LALMs, shedding light on future data and training design for robust acoustic memory modeling.

Audio large language models (ALLMs) can reason about the content of audio recordings to perform complex tasks. However, these capabilities usually collapse in real-world environments when background noise and competing sources mix the target sound. Inspired by long-term memory in human listening, we propose Long-Term Memory-Guided Audio Enhancement (LTM-AE) to improve selective target perception by refining the audio representations of ALLMs without training. LTM-AE extracts representations in hidden states from separate clean reference recordings as long-term memory for each category, guiding enhancement toward a user-specified listening target. We reconstruct incoming audio tokens in the selected category long-term memory and interpolate the reconstructions with the original tokens before language backbone decoding. This interpolation controls the influence of stored auditory experience while keeping all ALLM parameters fixed. Diagnostic readouts across twenty sound categories and three ALLMs show that LTM-AE strengthens responses to a specified target amid three interfering sources. Averaged over constrained and free-form classification, accuracy gains over raw mixtures range from 29.53 to 46.15 percentage points across multiple open source models. For speech content recovery, LTM-AE with an additional learned token-level gate reduces Qwen2-Audio's word error rate from 23.07% to 14.77%. This work takes an initial step toward using principles of human long-term memory to enhance ALLMs for real-world listening. Our code is available at https://github.com/aynlp/ltm-audio-code