RL-Guided Temporal Localization for Dual-Channel Retrieval in Long-Horizon Agent Memory

Dabin Sheng; Zhe Wu; Jinming Zhao; Junliang Xing; Yuanchun Shi

cs.AIOct 16, 2026

RL-Guided Temporal Localization for Dual-Channel Retrieval in Long-Horizon Agent Memory

Authors: Dabin Sheng, Zhe Wu, Jinming Zhao, Junliang Xing, Yuanchun Shi

Organizations: Key Laboratory of Pervasive Computing, Ministry of Education, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University · Qiyuan Lab

Abstract

Time-aware retrieval is crucial for long-horizon LLM agents to effectively leverage ever-growing long-term memory. Existing methods focus on lexical or semantic similarity, leading to target memories being crowded out by temporally mismatched yet semantically similar candidates. Even time-aware approaches inject temporal cues only during memory organization or answer generation, overlooking temporal constraints at the retrieval stage, where candidate selection occurs - the root cause of the displacement. Inspired by the temporal contiguity effect in human episodic memory, we propose TIDER (Temporal Interval-driven Dual-channel Evidence Retrieval), a time-aware agentic retrieval framework. Central to TIDER is a reinforcement learning (RL)-trained temporal interval locator that infers the temporal windows in which the evidence lies. RL optimizes window localization as a discrete, non-differentiable retrieval decision, using composite rewards to convert sparse answer supervision into fine-grained retrieval feedback. These temporal windows first define the temporal retrieval channel; the retrieved candidates are then merged with results from the semantic channel and reranked by proximity to the windows. This temporal grounding enables TIDER to retrieve temporally aligned evidence that would otherwise be drowned out by the volume of semantically similar yet temporally mismatched memories. With a lightweight 1.7B locator, TIDER achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both long-horizon memory benchmarks - 61.52% on LifeBench (+8.82%) and 78.96% on LoCoMo (+3.66%) - which indicates that temporal cues are crucial for pinpointing target evidence amid a vast pool of semantically similar historical events in long-term daily-life memory.

Figures & tables

Figure 1: Time-sensitive queries require evidence from a specific window, but semantic-only retrieval ranks semantically similar memories from the wrong time. TIDER predicts a temporal window to define the temporal channel, and promotes temporally aligned evidence into the retrieved context.

Figure 2: Overview of TIDER. TIDER uses a temporal interval locator to decide whether a query requires temporal constraints and, if so, to predict explicit temporal windows. The windows define the temporal channel, whose candidates are merged with semantic candidates and reranked by temporal distance; non-temporal queries fall back to the semantic-only path. The locator is trained with GRPO under rewards for switch detection, window localization, evidence coverage, and answer correctness.

Method	IE $\uparrow$	MR $\uparrow$	ND $\uparrow$	TKU $\uparrow$	Overall $\uparrow$	F1 $\uparrow$
TsContriever [ 28 ]	31.28 $\pm$ 1.05	23.33 $\pm$ 0.00	27.43 $\pm$ 0.60	23.91 $\pm$ 0.00	27.21 $\pm$ 0.42	49.36
MemOS [ 12 ]	54.57 $\pm$ 1.43	48.89 $\pm$ 0.48	42.01 $\pm$ 1.20	31.16 $\pm$ 1.26	47.30 $\pm$ 0.88	45.90
Zep [ 21 ]	43.61 $\pm$ 0.40	39.44 $\pm$ 0.96	32.99 $\pm$ 0.60	30.43 $\pm$ 2.17	38.40 $\pm$ 0.37	38.55
Mem0 [ 5 ]	57.99 $\pm$ 1.05	48.33 $\pm$ 2.89	50.35 $\pm$ 1.59	44.20 $\pm$ 6.64	51.80 $\pm$ 1.26	51.94
TiMem [ 11 ]	17.58 $\pm$ 1.43	17.50 $\pm$ 1.44	21.53 $\pm$ 3.01	10.87 $\pm$ 2.17	17.73 $\pm$ 0.57	18.89
NeSTR [ 13 ]	56.16 $\pm$ 1.37	52.22 $\pm$ 1.27	53.12 $\pm$ 1.80	42.03 $\pm$ 3.32	52.70 $\pm$ 0.65	61.25

Table 1: Performance comparison on the LifeBench benchmark. Categories include Information Extraction, Multi-hop Reasoning, Nondeclarative Memory Reasoning, and Temporal and Knowledge Updating. Best non-Oracle results are bolded ; underline indicates second best.

Method	Single-Hop $\uparrow$	Multi-Hop $\uparrow$	Temporal $\uparrow$	Open-Domain $\uparrow$	Overall $\uparrow$	F1 $\uparrow$
TsContriever [ 28 ]	77.41 $\pm$ 0.45	57.92 $\pm$ 0.33	62.93 $\pm$ 0.25	39.58 $\pm$ 0.85	68.47 $\pm$ 0.16	48.94
MemOS [ 12 ]	76.07 $\pm$ 0.10	56.85 $\pm$ 0.69	69.47 $\pm$ 0.25	45.14 $\pm$ 0.49	69.24 $\pm$ 0.11	45.02
Zep [ 21 ]	50.42 $\pm$ 0.29	42.20 $\pm$ 0.77	19.11 $\pm$ 0.29	38.19 $\pm$ 0.49	41.62 $\pm$ 0.21	26.88
Mem0 [ 5 ]	62.09 $\pm$ 0.42	50.14 $\pm$ 0.32	59.25 $\pm$ 0.41	37.70 $\pm$ 0.41	57.79 $\pm$ 0.34	42.52
TiMem [ 11 ]	81.43 $\pm$ 0.05	62.20 $\pm$ 0.82	77.63 $\pm$ 0.34	52.08 $\pm$ 0.74	75.30 $\pm$ 0.16	54.40
NeSTR [ 13 ]	82.60 $\pm$ 0.25	63.00 $\pm$ 1.02	66.56 $\pm$ 0.18	47.57 $\pm$ 0.60	73.48 $\pm$ 0.23	53.54

Table 2: Performance comparison on the LoCoMo benchmark. Reported categories include Single-hop, Multi-hop, Temporal Reasoning, and Open-domain Knowledge. Best results are bolded ; underline indicates second best.

Figure 3: LifeBench accuracy stratified by gold-window count. Bold labels report TIDER’s absolute accuracy; colored labels report each baseline’s delta from TIDER within the same category.

Variant	$\mathcal{S}_{q}$	Temporal	Decay $\gamma$	IE $\uparrow$	MR $\uparrow$	ND $\uparrow$	TKU $\uparrow$	Overall $\uparrow$	F1 $\uparrow$
TIDER (full)	✓	✓	✓	67.12	60.83	60.42	47.83	61.52	69.23
w/o decay rerank	✓	✓	$\times$	63.70	58.33	55.21	41.30	57.60	67.02
w/o temporal channel	✓	$\times$	$\times$	58.22	52.50	51.04	34.78	52.21	47.62
w/o summary (semantic)	$\times$	$\times$	$\times$	55.48	51.67	48.96	39.13	51.45	63.05

Table 3: Module ablations on LifeBench. Successively removing the distance-decay reranker, the temporal channel, and the timeline summary

\mathcal{S}_{q}

from TIDER; the bottom row is a pure semantic baseline. Best in column bold .

Figure 4: Locator substitution on LifeBench. Cells show accuracy differences (%) from TIDER; column headers show TIDER’s baseline scores.

Figure 5: Hyperparameter sensitivity analysis on LifeBench.

Appendix figures & tables16 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Method	Recall@10	Recall@20	nDCG@20	MRR@20
TsContriever	17.91	23.84	20.48	42.98
Semantic retriever (NeSTR input)	32.74	39.35	37.21	67.55
TIDER	33.18	48.36	48.67	73.71

Appendix

Table 4: Retrieval metrics on the same LifeBench memory pool

\mathcal{M}

. All values are reported as percentages and use LLM-judged binary relevance. Best results are bolded .

User	#Items	#Clusters	Items / cluster (avg)	Timeline span (days)
user-0	136,208	15,603	8.73	990
user-1	128,538	14,847	8.66	833
user-2	132,862	15,369	8.64	2,726
user-3	131,961	15,243	8.66	823
user-4	121,168	14,036	8.63	7,014
user-5	88,335	10,656	8.29	1,308

Appendix

Table 5: LifeBench memory-cluster statistics. “#Items” counts raw turns absorbed into clusters; “#Clusters” is the number of surviving event clusters after temporally aware greedy merging; “Items / cluster (avg)” is the arithmetic mean cluster size; “Timeline span (days)” is the span between the earliest and latest cluster date.

Category	N	Top-30 localization coverage
Non-temporal	50	87.60
Single-window	228	89.45
Dual-window	103	73.51
Multi-window	27	78.85
Overall	408	84.51

Appendix

Table 6: Coarse temporal-window localization coverage of the locator’s top-30 timeline-summary input on LifeBench. Coverage is judged by an LLM reviewer and averaged per question.

Parameter	Value
Advantage estimator	GRPO
KL coefficient $\beta$ (loss)	0.1
Group size $G$ (rollouts per prompt)	8
Rollout temperature	0.7
Peak learning rate	$5\times 10^{-6}$
LR schedule	cosine, warmup ratio 0.1

Appendix

Table 7: GRPO hyperparameters for training the locator

\pi_{\theta}

. The SFT-aligned Qwen3-1.7B policy is further optimized with GRPO using the configuration below.

Bucket ( $\|W_{\text{gold}}\|$ )	DAR factor	Effective probability
0 (non-temporal)	10.0	0.159
1 (single-window)	1.0	0.424
2 (dual-window)	1.0	0.160
$\geq 3$ (multi-window)	4.0	0.257

Appendix

Table 8: Difficulty-aware rollout reweighting (DAR) by gold-window count. “Effective probability” applies the DAR factors to the empirical training distribution and renormalizes the result.

Variant	IE $\uparrow$	MR $\uparrow$	ND $\uparrow$	TKU $\uparrow$	Overall $\uparrow$	F1 $\uparrow$
TIDER (SFT+GRPO, 1.7B)	67.12	60.83	60.42	47.83	61.52	69.23
w/o $r_{\text{win}},r_{\text{det}}$	60.96	56.67	58.33	32.61	55.88	67.46
w/o $r_{\text{out}}$	66.44	56.67	58.33	43.48	59.07	69.20
w/o $r_{\text{evd}}$	64.38	60.83	56.25	47.83	59.56	68.81

Appendix

Table 9: Reward-component leave-one-out ablations on LifeBench. The first row is full TIDER; subsequent rows remove the indicated term(s) during GRPO. Best results are bolded .

Figure 6: GRPO training curves of the 1.7B locator on LifeBench.

Figure 7: Capacity ablation on the GRPO training curve. Per-step reward (EMA

\alpha{=}0.95

, bias-corrected) for the 4B locator and the 1.7B.

Locator	IE $\uparrow$	MR $\uparrow$	ND $\uparrow$	TKU $\uparrow$	Overall $\uparrow$	F1 $\uparrow$
TIDER (4B)	65.07	61.67	59.38	50.00	61.03	69.57
TIDER (1.7B)	67.12	60.83	60.42	47.83	61.52	69.23
$\Delta$ ( $1.7$ B $-4$ B)	$+2.05$	$-0.84$	$+1.04$	$-2.17$	$+0.49$	$-0.34$

Appendix

Table 10: Locator capacity ablation on LifeBench (user-0/1,

n{=}408

). Per-category accuracy is reported alongside Overall accuracy and average F1. Per-column best results are bolded ; the

1.7

B locator is our adopted default.

Figure 8: Hyperparameter robustness on LifeBench. Five hyperparameters are swept individually around the default configuration (

K{=}30

\lambda_{\text{boost}}{=}0.3

\gamma_{\text{min}}{=}0.3

\rho{=}0.05

\tau_{\text{buf}}{=}14

). Each panel shows Overall accuracy (%) versus the swept value; the orange star marks the chosen default; the upper dashed line is TIDER’s default-config score; the lower dotted line is the No-Temporal lower bound.

Memory representation	Semantic retrieval	TIDER retrieval
Fixed chunks + session timestamps	50.49	58.58
Full temporally anchored memory pool $\mathcal{M}$	52.21	61.52

Appendix

Table 11: A

2\times 2

factorial comparison of memory representation and retrieval method on LifeBench. Values are Overall accuracy (%).

Retrieval budget $k$	10	20	30	40	50	100
TIDER	52.70	61.52	60.78	58.33	58.58	62.01
Semantic Only	46.86	52.21	52.90	57.49	56.04	57.73

Appendix

Table 12: Retrieval-budget sweep on LifeBench with the same memory pool and answer generator. Values are Overall accuracy (%).

Parameter	Settings	Accuracy (%)
$\Delta_{\text{date}}$ (days)	3 / 7 / 14	61.76 / 61.52 / 59.07
$\theta_{\text{sem}}$	0.75 / 0.85 / 0.95	59.56 / 61.52 / 61.27
Cluster-size cap	20 / 40 / 80	57.84 / 61.52 / 60.54
Summarizer	GPT-4.1-nano / GPT-4o-mini / GPT-5-mini	60.29 / 61.52 / 63.73

Appendix

Table 13: Memory-construction sensitivity on LifeBench. Settings and accuracies in each row correspond in order; accuracy is reported in percent.

Method	Non-temporal	Single-window	Dual-window	Multi-window	Overall
MemOS	52.67 $\pm$ 1.15	48.83 $\pm$ 1.10	42.07 $\pm$ 1.48	44.44 $\pm$ 11.11	47.30 $\pm$ 0.88
TiMem	23.33 $\pm$ 1.15	16.96 $\pm$ 1.10	17.80 $\pm$ 1.48	13.58 $\pm$ 4.28	17.73 $\pm$ 0.57
Zep	48.67 $\pm$ 7.02	38.74 $\pm$ 0.67	33.98 $\pm$ 1.68	33.33 $\pm$ 0.00	38.40 $\pm$ 0.37
Mem0	63.33 $\pm$ 3.06	51.32 $\pm$ 1.16	47.25 $\pm$ 4.04	51.85 $\pm$ 3.70	51.80 $\pm$ 1.26
TsContriever	38.00 $\pm$ 2.00	28.07 $\pm$ 1.16	23.62 $\pm$ 1.12	13.58 $\pm$ 4.28	27.21 $\pm$ 0.42
NeSTR	56.00 $\pm$ 2.00	55.12 $\pm$ 0.67	46.60 $\pm$ 1.68	49.38 $\pm$ 2.14	52.70 $\pm$ 0.65

Appendix

Table 14: LifeBench accuracy stratified by gold-window-count category. Best results are bolded ; underline indicates second best.

Comparison	$\Delta$ Acc	$b$	$c$	Exact $p$	Holm $p$
TIDER vs. MemOS	13.48	92	37	$1.40{\times}10^{-6}$	$4.19{\times}10^{-6}$
TIDER vs. TiMem	43.14	188	12	$8.11{\times}10^{-42}$	$4.87{\times}10^{-41}$
TIDER vs. Zep	22.79	121	28	$5.59{\times}10^{-15}$	$2.24{\times}10^{-14}$
TIDER vs. Mem0	8.33	66	32	$7.70{\times}10^{-4}$	$8.94{\times}10^{-4}$
TIDER vs. TsContriever	34.07	149	10	$6.25{\times}10^{-33}$	$3.12{\times}10^{-32}$
TIDER vs. NeSTR	8.09	59	26	$4.47{\times}10^{-4}$	$8.94{\times}10^{-4}$

Appendix

Table 15: Paired significance tests for TIDER against each baseline on LifeBench.

\Delta

Acc is reported in percentage points.

Method	Wrong	Retrieval miss	Temporal mismatch	Partial evidence	Reason failure	Retrieval-side failure
TIDER	157	27 (17.2%)	107 (68.2%)	5 (3.2%)	18 (11.5%)	139 (88.5%)
MemOS	212	41 (19.3%)	132 (62.3%)	13 (6.1%)	26 (12.3%)	186 (87.7%)
TiMem	333	174 (52.3%)	142 (42.6%)	7 (2.1%)	10 (3.0%)	323 (97.0%)
Zep	250	88 (35.2%)	115 (46.0%)	18 (7.2%)	29 (11.6%)	221 (88.4%)
Mem0	191	45 (23.6%)	123 (64.4%)	9 (4.7%)	14 (7.3%)	177 (92.7%)
TsContriever	296	143 (48.3%)	122 (41.2%)	8 (2.7%)	23 (7.8%)	273 (92.2%)

Appendix

Table 16: LLM-judged primary error causes over incorrect LifeBench answers. Percentages are computed within each method’s incorrect answers.

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Abstract

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