HABIT-Bench: Evaluating Habit Induction from Longitudinal Weak Evidence in Agent Memory
Organizations: LUMIA Lab, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Fudan University
Abstract
In long-term interactions with large language model (LLM) agents, users reveal habits through their choices and actions. These habits capture implicit user information that agents must infer across conversations. However, individual observations may provide only partial evidence about a habit or when it applies. Retaining past interactions alone does not ensure that agents can infer habits and apply them appropriately. We introduce HABIT-Bench to evaluate how well agent memory systems infer habits from weak evidence and apply them to later requests. We construct synthetic user histories from task-oriented dialogue data and controlled habit graphs. The histories span hundreds of sessions across food, finance, software, and travel. Four-choice tasks assess agents' ability to infer user habits and apply them appropriately. They include temporary exceptions, changes in habits, and suggestions that users have not accepted. Sampled tasks undergo independent human review. We evaluate eight memory methods with Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.3-Flash. The best-performing memory method achieves 33.61% macro accuracy across the four domains. Performance remains limited even when annotated evidence is supplied directly. These results expose a persistent gap between access to past interactions and the ability to infer and appropriately use user habits.
Figures & tables
| Benchmark | Long Hist. | Weak Evid. | Action | Context Gate | Exception | Temp. Drift | Withhold |
| LoCoMo [ Maharana et al., 2024 ] | |||||||
| LongMemEval [ Wu et al., 2024 ] | |||||||
| MemoryAgentBench [ Hu et al., 2026a ] | |||||||
| MemoryArena [ He et al., 2026 ] | |||||||
| Mem2ActBench [ Shen et al., 2026 ] | |||||||
| PERMA [ Liu et al., 2026 ] |
| Domain | Users | Sessions | Probes | Source dataset |
| Food | 30 | 3900 | 630 | CookDial [ Jiang et al., 2023 ] |
| Finance | 36 | 19440 | 1368 | MultiDoGO [ Peskov et al., 2019 ] |
| Software | 18 | 9720 | 680 | MultiDoGO [ Peskov et al., 2019 ] |
| Travel | 30 | 4092 | 650 | Taskmaster-2 [ Byrne et al., 2019 ] |
| Method | Qwen3-235B-A22B | GLM-5.3-Flash | ||||||||
| Food | Finance | Software | Travel | Macro | Food | Finance | Software | Travel | Macro | |
| Controls | ||||||||||
| No Memory | 22.38 | 23.54 | 24.85 | 28.31 | 24.77 | 23.81 | 22.95 | 22.50 | 32.46 | 25.43 |
| Full Memory | 48.25 | 20.54 | 21.76 | 33.38 | 30.99 | 45.56 | 33.77 | 37.50 | 51.08 | 41.98 |
| Retrieval baselines | ||||||||||
| Recency-5 | 24.13 | 22.51 | 24.26 | 31.23 | 25.53 | 18.10 | 23.46 | 23.53 | 39.69 | 26.20 |
| Method | Qwen3-8B | Qwen3-235B-A22B | ||||||
| Food | Finance | Software | Travel | Food | Finance | Software | Travel | |
| No Memory | 20.79 | 23.32 | 27.21 | 26.46 | 22.38 | 23.54 | 24.85 | 28.31 |
| Oracle Evidence | 53.33 | 29.82 | 31.91 | 42.15 | 58.25 | 42.91 | 39.26 | 55.54 |
| Oracle Habit State | 92.54 | 93.71 | 94.56 | 98.31 | 98.41 | 98.54 | 99.26 | 99.23 |
Appendix figures & tables15 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Criterion | Food | Finance | Software | Travel |
| Recorded quality judgments | ||||
| Unique answerability | 200/200 | 336/340 | 311/311 | 618/618 |
| Evidence sufficiency | 200/200 | 340/340 | 311/311 | 618/618 |
| Scope correctness | 200/200 | 336/340 | 311/311 | 618/618 |
| Boundary / exception | 200/200 | 340/340 | 311/311 | 495/495 |
| Choice balance | 200/200 | 340/340 | 311/311 | 618/618 |
| Domain | Agreement (%) | A–gold | B–gold | Blanks A/B | |||
| Food | 200 | 200 | 99.50 | 0.9933 | 200/200 | 199/200 | 0/0 |
| Finance | 340 | 336 | 100.00 | 1.0000 | 340/340 | 336/336 | 0/4 |
| Software | 311 | 309 | 99.68 | 0.9957 | 310/311 | 309/309 | 0/2 |
| Travel | 618 | 545 | 92.84 | 0.9044 | 515/577 | 501/564 | 41/54 |
| Coverage | Probes |
| Distinct reviewed probes | 618 |
| Outside the human-review sample | 32 |
| Total probes | 650 |
| Content-revised probes passing targeted validation | 79/79 |
| Implementation class | Methods |
| official-code adapter | A-MEM, Letta, LightMem, Mem0, MemOS, MemRL, MIRIX |
| official-source adapted | SeCom |
| HABIT-native retrieval | Recency-5, Recency-10, BM25 RAG, Dense RAG, Temporal Hybrid RAG |
| evaluator control | Full History, Full Memory, No Memory |
| private diagnostic oracle | Oracle Evidence, Oracle Habit State |
| Method | F/S temporal | F/S provenance | F/S reference | Travel induction | Travel exception |
| Full Memory | 22.8 | 20.2 | 21.2 | 29.6 | 39.4 |
| A-MEM | 24.8 | 23.0 | 23.1 | 35.2 | 36.4 |
| Letta | 23.5 | 22.0 | 23.1 | 37.0 | 45.5 |
| LightMem | 24.4 | 22.8 | 22.5 | 37.0 | 27.3 |
| Mem0 | 25.1 | 24.0 | 22.8 | 35.2 | 42.4 |
| MemOS | 24.6 | 22.8 | 22.2 | 35.2 | 27.3 |
| Method | Food | Finance | Software | Travel |
| Controls | ||||
| Full Memory | 41.1 [37.6, 44.8] | 20.8 [18.1, 23.6] | 23.2 [20.1, 26.1] | 28.1 [24.0, 32.7] |
| Retrieval baselines | ||||
| Recency-5 | 21.3 [17.8, 25.1] | 23.0 [20.5, 25.7] | 25.9 [23.1, 28.7] | 26.5 [22.1, 31.0] |
| Recency-10 | 21.9 [19.2, 24.8] | 22.8 [20.2, 25.5] | 26.3 [23.5, 29.3] | 30.2 [25.5, 34.9] |
| BM25 RAG | 42.7 [39.5, 45.7] | 23.0 [20.7, 25.4] | 24.4 [21.2, 27.6] | 33.6 [29.0, 38.2] |
| Method | Food | Finance | Software | Travel |
| No Memory | 20.8 [17.1, 24.6] | 23.3 [20.5, 26.3] | 27.2 [23.9, 30.3] | 26.9 [23.4, 30.4] |
| Oracle Evidence | 53.3 [50.3, 56.5] | 29.8 [27.4, 32.3] | 31.9 [29.1, 34.7] | 42.2 [37.8, 46.4] |
| Oracle Habit State | 92.5 [90.6, 94.4] | 93.7 [92.4, 94.9] | 94.6 [92.2, 96.6] | 98.4 [97.6, 99.2] |
| Method | 4B | 8B | 14B | 32B | 235B-A22B |
| Full Memory | 26.29 | 28.08 | 29.40 | 29.88 | 30.99 |
| A-MEM | 29.41 | 30.34 | 30.63 | 31.46 | 33.06 |
| Mem0 | 25.14 | 26.58 | 27.80 | 28.52 | 28.51 |
| MemOS | 27.40 | 29.49 | 30.01 | 29.90 | 29.60 |
| MemRL | 29.31 | 29.23 | 30.21 | 31.25 | 31.85 |
| LightMem | 26.33 | 27.16 | 28.14 | 25.04 | 27.01 |
| Method | Macro Acc. | ER † | Hit@5 | NDCG@5 | MRR@5 | CG@5 | Joint A+E | Memory tokens |
| Full Memory | 29.88 | 36.83 | — | — | — | — | 22.69 | 33,131.1 |
| Source-attributed top-five memory methods | ||||||||
| A-MEM | 31.46 | 13.89 | 41.44 | 16.21 | 26.22 | 8.20 | 16.20 | 2,933.7 |
| Mem0 | 28.52 | 11.17 | 39.30 | 13.63 | 24.58 | 7.00 | 12.92 | 107.2 |
| MemOS | 29.90 | 11.85 | 38.40 | 14.50 | 25.22 | 7.27 | 14.42 | 436.6 |
| MemRL | 31.25 | 12.67 | 37.77 | 14.99 | 24.68 | 5.49 | 14.36 | 1,735.1 |
LLM Agent Memory
Large language model agent memory lets agents retain, organize, retrieve, and update information across interactions and long-running tasks.
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