MemSteer: Turning User Histories into Supervision for Agent Memory Optimization

A central role of personal-agent memory is to turn stored information and prior interactions into future-oriented assistance. In daily use, useful cues come from what the agent observes and how the user interacts with the agent, and the agent must carry them forward from the current request to similar future tasks. Existing memory benchmarks usually test dialogue recall or task improvement in isolation, leaving the trajectory from streaming observations to later assistance largely untested. We introduce StreamMemBench, a streaming benchmark that constructs a two-step task sequence around each evidence anchor from EgoLife egocentric streams. The initial task tests evidence use, while the follow-up task tests whether feedback and interaction experience are reused. Four metrics diagnose evidence recall, initial evidence use, feedback incorporation, and follow-up reuse. Experiments with eight memory systems across two backbones show that current systems often fail to use observed evidence or turn feedback into reliable follow-up behavior, even when evidence is stored or feedback is incorporated locally. StreamMemBench is publicly available at https://github.com/landian60/StreamMemBench.

Recent memory agents improve LLMs by extracting experiences and conversation history into an external storage. This enables low-overhead context assembly and online memory update without expensive LLM training. However, existing solutions remain passive and reactive; memory growth is bounded by information that happens to be available, while memory agents seldom seek external inputs in uncertainties. We propose autonomous memory agents that actively acquire, validate, and curate knowledge at a minimum cost. U-Mem materializes this idea via (i) a cost-aware knowledge-extraction cascade that escalates from cheap self/teacher signals to tool-verified research and, only when needed, expert feedback, and (ii) semantic-aware Thompson sampling to balance exploration and exploitation over memories and mitigate cold-start bias. On both verifiable and non-verifiable benchmarks, U-Mem consistently beats prior memory baselines and can surpass RL-based optimization, improving HotpotQA (Qwen2.5-7B) by 14.6 points and AIME25 (Gemini-2.5-flash) by 7.33 points.

Long-term agents must remember not only what is true about a user, but also how a particular agent should work with that user as their shared history evolves. Existing benchmarks primarily supervise user facts and preferences or experience reusable across users, leaving this relationship-specific agent memory implicit. Additionally, most prior works measure the model solely with final-answer QA over long interaction histories, making the assessment still incomplete and unreliable. To this end, we introduce DyadMem with the proposed new definition User-conditioned Relational Agent Memory (URAM). DyadMem jointly annotates user-side memory and URAM along the same multi-session trajectories, resulting in 6 memory categories. To summarize, it includes 3,065 episodes, 50,961 sessions, and 61,210 QA instances, with extensive session-level Capture and Update gold annotations, query-level Recall support, and two QA settings: Gold-Memory and Full-Pipeline. Across 16 open-weight and 4 proprietary models, Gold-Memory QA is consistently strong, yet Full-Pipeline QA drops sharply. Such a gap explicitly supports our fine-grained evaluation design. Additionally, several quantitative results further reveal low Capture recall, incomplete Recall, and unsafe-deletion issues arising from even the frontier LLMs. We further conduct a rigorous experiment to validate the effectiveness of our URAM and observe the positive effects for all 20 models. In summary, DyadMem is a dual-domain, full-pipeline memory benchmark with extensive annotation efforts for advancing the domain's development.