Long-Term Conversational Memory

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32 papers in the last four weeks, up 191% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

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Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

Relevance Is Not Sufficiency: What Actually Closes the Evidence Gap in Long-Term Memory QA

LLM agents that interact with a user across many sessions accumulate histories that exceed their context window, so they store past interactions in an external memory and answer each question from a small set of retrieved records. Existing memory systems rank records by lexical or embedding relevance, yet the top-ranked memories can each be relevant while jointly omitting a complementary fact that the answer requires, especially for multi-session and temporal questions. Drawing on the distinction between relevance and sufficiency in legal evidence scholarship, we recast memory retrieval as constructing a sufficient memory set. To operationalize this view, we introduce a blinded LLM judgment over the retrieved set, together with Gold Hit and Turn Hit as evidence-coverage proxies. We then propose Budgeted Flat Reconstruction (BFR), which builds sufficient sets over a fixed flat memory store in two stages. Specifically, we first apply Formal Concept Analysis for Memory Selection (FCA-MS) to decompose the question into information requirements and select a compact candidate subset that jointly covers them. Then, we repeatedly acquire unseen records through deeper text search or complementary entity and session views, stopping when the budget is exhausted. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S show that BFR outperforms same-store adaptations of recent agent-memory systems in both answer quality and evidence coverage. Specifically, on LongMemEval-S it raises judged accuracy from 72.4% to 82.2% and Turn Hit to 91.4%.

Yufeng Li, Shuxin Li, Zhenhua Xu +7

East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China +3

Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management Evidence Retrieval

Oct 6, 2026cs.AI

Whose Memory Is It? Scope-Aware Commit Rules for Long-Term LLM Memory

Persistent memory allows an LLM agent to carry experience across conversations, but it also turns a local reasoning mistake into a durable one. During deliberation, an agent may consider a plan, simulate a tool result, report another speaker's belief, and then reject all of them. If memory retains only the resulting sentences, those once-useful possibilities can later return as facts. The record is neither fabricated nor irrelevant; it has simply been detached from the context in which it was valid. We identify this missing context as \emph{discourse ownership}: the world, branch, or speaker that licenses a proposition. Our first finding is counterintuitive. Language models already carry a causally active signal for ownership, yet conventional memory interfaces discard it when they convert reasoning into records. We introduce CASK (Causally Anchored Scoping Keys), a commit rule that preserves this signal so that shared-world facts enter durable memory while provisional content remains available only within its original scope. Our second finding is that the most obvious way to preserve the signal---storing the discovered internal coordinates---is unreliable because equivalent representations need not keep the same coordinates. CASK instead preserves the stable relations that express ownership. Controlled long-conversation conflicts and tool-agent traces show that this design improves memory admission and prevents provisional content from contaminating later answers while complementing runtime provenance. The resulting commit boundary lets agents explore more possibilities without granting every intermediate sentence authority over future behavior.

Hongyu Gu, Xinchang Li

University of Science and Technology of China Hefei, China

Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Oct 6, 2026cs.CL

Memory Depth and Reconstructed Context Width: A Controlled Evaluation of Hierarchical Retrieval

Long-term conversational memory is becoming an integral component of modern LLM systems. Proposed architectures group records by topics and events, construct hierarchies and graphs, and connect facts through causal and temporal relations. We experimentally study the interaction between two memory parameters: structural depth and the width of context supplied to the answer model. Using EverMemBench, we evaluate depths D1-D4, core budgets of 1,024/2,048/4,096 tokens, and additional Production and Oracle conditions up to the full archive. Increasing width from 1K to 4K improves Accuracy by 10.11-17.98 percentage points, whereas increasing depth provides no monotonic gain. Beyond 8-16K, Production performance reaches a plateau while tokens per correct answer continue to increase; Oracle preserves quality on full archives of 68-71K tokens. These results motivate further investigation of large, coherent context blocks instead of progressively deeper memory structures.

Michael Andreev

Independent Researcher

Conversational Memory LLM Evaluation Long-Context Modeling Hierarchical Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory

Oct 5, 2026cs.AI

The Right Memory in the Wrong Context: Verifying Retrieval Admissibility in Long-Term Agent Memory

Long-term-memory agents can retrieve relevant information that is inadmissible for the current request because it belongs to another principal, violates policy, or reflects an incompatible lifecycle state. Recall and final-answer accuracy do not reveal this: a route can appear safe by missing required evidence, while a correct answer may follow inadmissible prompt exposure. We introduce a retrieval-admissibility verification framework that assigns each memory-query pair one of three statuses (admissible, inadmissible, or unresolved), compares routes at matched required-evidence recall with bounds for unresolved cases, and tracks memory IDs through prompt exposure while linking exposure to target-level disclosure. We evaluate its stages on separate, non-pooled populations. A post-hoc top-20 reanalysis of frozen rankings from two public long-term-memory benchmarks, RHELM and MemOps, covers 3,767 queries. All released anchors lie within trusted query namespaces; with within-namespace scores unchanged, off-namespace filtering cannot lower their ranks. Top-20 anchor recall increases from 0.432 to 0.533, 80% recall feasibility from 0.237 to 0.311, and exact similarity evaluations decrease by 98.3%. In a frozen 72-case development diagnostic, a released-metadata reference preserves required evidence, whereas neither text-only verifier detects violations under the 1% required-anchor false-denial limit. Across 1,523 paired benchmark-native cases, namespace routing is associated with judged-accuracy gains of 0.053-0.068 across three readers; recall also changes, so this comparison is observational. In 16 controlled exposure scenarios, only one of four reader-specific 95% confidence intervals excludes zero for relevant-inadmissible literal disclosure (+0.156, 95% CI [0.031, 0.312]). Results motivate separate verification of candidate support, admissibility, prompt exposure, and answer disclosure.

Zi Wang, Xingqiao Wang, Emmanuel Addai +2

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Oct 1, 2026cs.AI

RealCompanion: Benchmarking Human Understanding from Reasoning over Longitudinal Real-World Conversations

An AI companion that talks with someone for months should come to understand them. It should know who they are, remember what they said, and recognize when something from the past matters now. Testing this needs real conversations, but real conversations are private, so existing benchmarks use invented people and invented questions. We release RealCompanion, ten real relationships between people and an AI companion, with 27,218 messages over up to 120 days. For each person, we release the full conversation, a profile, a persona, chat test items, and question test items. Every label points to the messages that support it, and every chat label comes with the reasoning that produced it. The real data shows three things. First, people rarely refer back. Only 3.4% of their messages depend on something said earlier, and when one does, the earlier message is usually far away (a median of 2,157 messages back). Averages hide this. Looking at the most recent messages finds the needed one 95.9% of the time overall, but only 2.2% of the time when it is far back. Second, AI systems cannot tell when the past matters. The detectors we tested barely beat chance on real messages, and when the same earlier messages are labeled "memories" instead of "earlier messages", models bring up the past 10 to 14 percentage points more often, even when nothing from the past is needed. Third, AI systems read more into a person than the person revealed. Three agent systems rebuild each persona equally well (F1 0.71). They see the person, and then imagine more. Understanding a person depends on knowing when their past matters and where what they shared ends, and only real conversations can test it.

Arman Behnam, Sunglyoung Kim, Jiayi Yu +2

Quis Lab, USA · Independent Researcher, China

Memory Agent Benchmarks User Modeling Long-Term Conversational Memory

Oct 1, 2026cs.CL

Madeleine: Learning Involuntary Recall for Conversational Memory from Simulated Lives

A long-term conversational assistant must recall the right memory at the right moment, yet the memory that matters most is often not similar to what the user says now. Current systems recover such associations by letting an LLM reason at write or read time, at a cost of hundreds to over a thousand LLM calls per memory bank and up to several thousand context tokens per query. We argue that association is a learnable relevance: the pointwise mutual information of memories under how human lives unfold. We introduce Madeleine, which learns amortized association: offline, an LLM life simulator writes simulated lives, whose cue-trigger pairs teach a query encoder a residual association on top of frozen similarity; online, it calls no LLM and plugs into any vector memory by replacing only the query encoder. On LoCoMo-Plus under the official protocol, Madeleine (I) reaches 66.6 when plugged into HyperMem, the highest among all systems evaluated under this protocol; (II) used alone, reaches the score of HyperMem as released (52.4 vs. 52.9) with zero LLM calls and about 1/21 of its answer context; and (III) lifts T-Mem by 26.2 points, significantly outperforms the same untrained backbone inside both systems, and leaves ordinary QA intact on the 4B backbone.

Zhiyun Shi

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Memory-Augmented Language Models Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Associative Memory

Oct 1, 2026cs.CL

Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention for Conversational LLMs

Large language models often lose track of persistent instructions and relevant information as multi-turn conversations grow. We study this cumulative contextual decay through three related failure modes: attention pollution, dilution, and drift. We propose REA (Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention), a context-management framework that assigns different persistence and representation policies to instructions and episodic interactions. Instructional Memory retains identified global constraints in a dedicated prefix. Episodic Memory preserves user inputs and compresses model replies, while heuristic retrieval selects raw text, compressed representations, or omission for each historical turn. On Long-MT-Bench+, REA improves the judge score from 6.32 to 7.36 on a 10-point scale, a 16.5% relative gain over the Vanilla baseline, and reduces average latency by 2.91

\times

. Additional evaluations show aggregate gains on three backbones spanning 1.7B-7B parameters and on Chinese and English role-playing tasks. These results support role-aware context management as a practical approach to maintaining conversational continuity and instruction adherence.

Wanyang Hong, Zhaoning Zhang, Yi Chen +5

National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing, College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China.

Memory-Augmented Language Models Long-Context Language Model Inference Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory LLM Context Management

Oct 1, 2026cs.AI

MemFit: Efficient Long-Term Agentic Memory

Long-term memory systems for large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity for extending reasoning capabilities across applications. Current memory systems rely on LLM agents to organize and consolidate memory, resulting in costly, inefficient write operations. To address this limitation, we propose MemFit, a long-term memory system for conversational agents that reduces the cost and latency of memory operations. Unlike existing systems that rely on expensive LLM calls for memory construction or discard surface-level details through compression, MemFit stores each turn verbatim in an append-only store with near-instantaneous, LLM-free insertion, indexing turns with segment summaries rather than replacing them. Additionally, MemFit uses an LLM-free, multi-path retrieval strategy that combines lexical and semantic signals with cross-encoder reranking over caption- augmented episodes in both textual and multimodal settings. Empirical results on three widely used benchmarks, LoCoMo, MemGallery, and LongMemEval-S, show that MemFit achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing memory construction time and cost several-fold, providing a scalable and efficient solution for persistent agentic memory.

Mitchell Piehl, Muchao Ye

Department of Computer Science The University of Iowa

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 30, 2026cs.CL

StateTree: Enhancing Long-Term Dialogue Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Large language models deployed as personalized assistants must reason over long, evolving interaction histories. However, in long-term dialogue reasoning, relevant evidence is scattered across sessions, preferences may be revised over time, and standard long-context training fails to address these challenges under data scarcity and prohibitive computational costs. We propose StateTree, a data-driven RL method that constructs a challenging auxiliary task from scarce dialogues with verifiable ground truth. StateTree augments multi-session dialogues with a tree-structured path-tracing task: key-value records are embedded across sessions to form a binary tree. Solving the task requires the model to traverse from root to leaf by retrieving records across sessions and comparing timestamps to resolve branches, then recover the hidden target question among distractor leaves. We apply curriculum RL training progressively increasing tree depth and introduce a compositional variant whose edges carry step-level reasoning fragments, training the model to compose partial cues into coherent queries. Trained on 10K-token contexts, StateTree generalizes to 128K tokens without full-length RL costs and exhibits capabilities including cross-session retrieval, temporal reasoning, knowledge update, and compositional multi-hop reasoning. StateTree outperforms both SFT and RL-based baselines while preserving short-context general reasoning. StateTree-7B achieves gains up to +23.60% on LongMemEval (128k), and StateTree-14B reaches 59.00% accuracy on LongMemEval, surpassing QwenLong-L1-32B (45.20%).

Naen Xu, Wanqing Cui, Yibo Hu +5

Zhejiang University · Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba

Temporal Reasoning in Language Models RL for Language Model Reasoning Long-Context Modeling Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 29, 2026cs.IR

TAGGRAPH: Tag-Augmented Graphs for Graph Retrieval of Agent Persistent Histories

Long-term memory lets LLM agents recall past interactions and remain consistent across sessions, but memory systems are hard to compare because they often vary in representation, indexing, retrieval, and evaluation. We present a controlled evaluation framework based on shared 5W-style conversational memories. Localized graph configurations traverse a common base graph; AdaptiveGraph adds chronological edges and Personalized PageRank diffusion. We also evaluate BM25 over the same extracted notes and OpenClaw as a raw-input external reference. Retrieval rankings vary across memory settings. On LongMemEval-S, AdaptiveGraph is the strongest graph configuration at 0.844 MRR, but BM25 reaches 0.867 and OpenClaw 0.880. On ATANT Core, localized graph traversal outperforms diffusion and BM25, whereas BM25 leads the stress rounds. Reducing LongMemEval-S within the tested range does not reproduce the ATANT diffusion penalty, but the smallest tested store remains larger than ATANT Core, so store size cannot be ruled out. The penalty also persists under a permissive content-match criterion. Vocabulary normalization and extraction quality substantially affect graph retrieval, and missing extraction tags are common among top-five misses. Retrieval strategies should therefore be evaluated jointly with the memory setting and against strong lexical baselines.

Yu-Shu Chen, Yu-Jung Liang, Pengtao Xie

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093, USA

Graph-Based Retrieval Memory Agent Benchmarks Graph-Based Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 29, 2026cs.CL

Auditable Long-Term Memory: A Deterministic Retrieval Chain Measured at 479/475 of 500 on LongMemEval-S

We evaluate an auditable long-term memory system on LongMemEval-S. Its retrieval chain uses hybrid candidate retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, coverage-first packet compilation, and deterministic reasoning scaffolds; an LLM is used only as a replaceable final reader. The chain places all gold sessions in the candidate pool for 468/470 answerable questions and produces gold-complete packets for 462/470. With a Claude Opus reader called through an unpinned CLI alias, two 500-question passes score 479/500 and 475/500 under GPT-4o. The 72 answerable knowledge-update rows used a substantively modified scoring prompt whose effect under the official text has not been measured. The pair straddles Chronos High's published 478/500; differences in reader generation, scoring prompt, and possibly data version, plus within-system variance, establish neither superiority nor equivalence. A grok-4.6-high reader on the same packets scores 476/474, while a maximum-reasoning-effort agentic variant regresses to 461/465. The headline passes differ on eight verdict-flip rows. A second judge agrees with the headline judge on 493/500 rows (98.6%) in each pass and scores both passes 472/500; the official judge also flips three verdicts when re-scoring byte-identical pass-1 answers. Negative controls rejected a verifier that repaired three wrong drafts but broke eleven correct drafts. All components were developed on the same 500 questions, with no held-out evaluation or independent human adjudication; retrieval and scaffold method sources and transcript-derived audits are held; and the headline reader received extra operator context, its complete requests were not retained, and MCP tool availability is unresolved. We release materialized packets, scaffolds, reader outputs, judge verdicts, and controls for inspection and re-scoring.

Christopher J. Chanhnourack

Centennial Defense Systems (Archivist)

Long-Context Retrieval LLM Auditing Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 29, 2026cs.CL

Learning to Retrieve Missing Evidence for Long-Term Memory QA

Long-term memory enables language models to use past interactions in future conversations. However, evidence needed to answer a question may be scattered across distant turns, while the question itself omits clues needed to locate it. Retrieved facts can reveal these clues, motivating retrieval decisions conditioned on evidence already found. We introduce MERA (Missing-Evidence Retrieval Augmentation), which separates globally searchable memory from a question-specific evidence state. Verified evidence guides subsequent retrieval without restricting access to the global memory. We train a lightweight planner through reinforcement learning, rewarding queries that recover previously missing evidence. MERA achieves strong answer accuracy across Qwen3-30B and GPT-4o-mini backbones. With Qwen3-30B for evidence processing and answer generation, the trained 0.6B planner achieves 77.40% accuracy on LoCoMo and 71.29% on LongMemEval-S, exceeding a 30B planner without retrieval-grounded training by 4.10% and 3.96%, respectively. On LoCoMo, later retrieval rounds increase cumulative evidence recall from 55.5% to 80.5%.

Yi-Xuan Deng, Yi Zhang, Wei Liu +2

Tsinghua University

Persistent Memory for Language Models Question Answering RL for IR Long-Term Conversational Memory Evidence Retrieval

Sep 29, 2026cs.CL

AMU:Admission and Memory Update for Personalized Conversations---Structured Memory with SLM Guided Control

Large language models (LLMs) have become the foundation of personalized assistants, but maintaining persistent user memory across long-term interactions remains challenging. Existing memory systems often focus on storage, retrieval, or consolidation, while memory writing remains less controlled: transient requests, duplicate statements, and outdated user states may enter memory and later be retrieved for personalization. In this paper, we present AMU: Admission and Memory Update for Personalized Conversations, an SLM-guided (Small language model guided) structured framework for writing-time memory control. AMU uses structured memory filtering to decide what should enter memory and SLM-guided storage management to determine whether an admitted record should be stored separately, discarded as a duplicate, or fused as an update. We evaluate AMU in a controlled memory writing and retrieval setting. Experimental results show that AMU maintains cleaner and more retrievable personalized memories.

Tao Hwang, Yishi Diao

Independent Researcher · Nanchang University

Conversational Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Personalized Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 28, 2026cs.CL

Mnemon: Raw Records, Fast Judgments, Slow Thoughts

Long-term memory lets an LLM assistant use a history it can no longer reread, and most memory systems build it by rewriting conversations into facts, graphs or typed memories at write time. We argue that the work of memory divides, as thinking does, into two systems. Most of it is fast System 1 work: many small, independent yes/no judgments about records, such as whether a record is needed or no longer current, which a decision model makes by the dozen in a third of a second. Only a little is slow System 2 work: writing a few search queries, naming what the reply needs and composing the answer, which an LLM does well but slowly. We present Mnemon, a memory agent built on this division. It keeps conversations as raw, dated records; an LLM (System 2) plans searches over them, a decision model, Jev (System 1), judges what the searches return, and rules with explicit budgets turn the judgments into a small View for an unchanged answering model. A background pass consolidates each record once into topic timelines, value histories and standing instructions linked to the records, so that questions about a whole conversation reach evidence their own searches miss. Because nothing is decided about a record when it is written, the same agent can read any store that returns dated records. With gpt-4.1-mini answering, as in a public re-evaluation of 14 systems, Mnemon scores 91.7% on LoCoMo, the highest among them, and 83.8% on LongMemEval-S, from under 4k tokens of context per question, with the lowest effective cost index on LoCoMo. With a reasoning model answering, it reaches 92.2% on LoCoMo and 94.4% on LongMemEval-S, the latter on par with the best published results. From 100K to 10M tokens of history on BEAM, its cost per question grows by a factor of 1.11. On the same records, Jev separates gold evidence better than two LLMs and is 3-11 times faster.

Guangren Wang

Persistent Memory for Language Models Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

EP-Mem: Elastic Privacy Memory for Social Relationship-Aware LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents face critical privacy risks when acting as delegates in human-agent-human communication. To prevent such breaches, agents must understand users' social relationships and adhere to context-dependent social information disclosure boundaries. Current studies on agent memory privacy focus on instantaneous interactions, leaving the long-term relational disclosure problem unexplored. In this paper, we propose EP-Mem, an Elastic Privacy Memory architecture that reframes privacy as user-owned boundary control across social roles. EP-Mem introduces (1) token-level memory driven by user-configurable a privacy policy that stratifies persons and events, combining domain-level default circulation rules with fact-level whitelist/blacklist exceptions; and (2) a pluggable sidecar with a privacy engine that aligns disclosure controls with memory across summary, detail, and boundary granularities, enforced throughout generation, storage, and retrieval. We construct EP-Bench, to our knowledge the first long-term multi-party benchmark with cross-session correlated events for policy-conditioned relational disclosure. Experiments show that EP-Mem achieves 94.0% privacy classification accuracy, improves disclosure-permission judgment from 22% to 68%, and reduces privacy leakage by 75.6%, while maintaining retrieval performance and cross-benchmark generalization.

Fengzhou Sun, Yuan Zhang, Xintong Yu +1

State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China, Beijing, China

LLM Agent Memory Privacy Leakage in Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 28, 2026cs.CL

Remember by Asking: Retrieval-Induced Memory Evolution for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for language agents to maintain coherent and effective behavior over extended, multi-session interactions. Existing memory systems mainly use retrieval at read time, while write-time memory formation still relies on direct extraction or compression. However, when future information needs are unknown, compressing an entire interaction in one pass can overlook locally important details that may matter later. To this end, we introduce RIME, a retrieval-induced memory framework that shifts memory construction from monolithic compression toward evidence-centered integration. RIME uses generic self-questions to retrieve focused dialogue evidence and grounds memory formation in both the retrieved evidence and relevant historical memories, which are jointly reconciled into an evolving memory bank with temporal and provenance information. At inference time, compressed memory serves as the primary rather than the sole source of evidence: when it cannot support an answer, RIME retrieves relevant source dialogue together with its local context to recover information omitted during memory formation, without resorting to full-history processing. Extensive experiments on LoCoMo with Qwen3-235B-A22B and GPT-5.6 Sol show that RIME consistently achieves the best performance across all three quality metrics among the compared methods, while requiring substantially fewer query-time LLM tokens.

Wanqi Zhou, Jiawei Lu, Yang Wang +4

Chang’an University

LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Stashbird: Efficient Speaker-Indexed Memory for Conversational Agents

AI agents require memory that preserves information across user-agent exchanges, user-to-user conversations, and group conversations with or without agent participation, while supporting updates as evidence changes or is removed. We present Stashbird, an agent memory system that links source episodes to derived memory state through explicit provenance. Stashbird organizes memory into episodic records, semantic relations, community summaries, and persisted graph state, with lifecycle operations for incremental updates and episode-level deletion. We evaluate question-answering accuracy and model-facing workload across four long-term memory benchmarks. On LoCoMo, Stashbird uses 76.4x fewer ingestion prompt tokens than Graphiti. Compared with reproduced Hindsight on the same benchmark, it uses 8.1x fewer retrieval prompt tokens, with accuracy 1.6 percentage points lower. It achieves higher accuracy than Hindsight on LongMemEval-S and GroupMemBench and comparable accuracy on EverMemBench.

Chidera Biringa, Lucas Yannul, Xiaowen Wang +5

Microsoft

Persistent Memory for Language Models Graph-Based Agent Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

When Does Selection Replace Extraction? A Pre-Registered Test of Agent Memory with a Typed Decision Model

Does conversational memory need LLM-extracted facts, or is selecting the right raw turns enough? Published results disagree. Extraction-based systems report gains from distilled facts. Recent studies find raw history with good ranking does as well, but disagree about whether ranking matters. We ran a pre-registered study on held-out LoCoMo conversations and LongMemEval. At a tight budget on LoCoMo, raw turns selected by a single call to Jev, a typed decision model, are non-inferior to an LLM-extraction memory (one-sided 95% bound -3.0 points against a -5-point margin). Blind human grading narrows the margin but does not change the result. Raw turns cost 3,061 times less to write, and the result holds with a second answer model. Within this study, reranking's gain shrinks as the budget grows. It adds 17.4 points on LoCoMo and 9.1 on LongMemEval when three of 30 candidates are kept. At generous budgets it adds 1.5 and 1.1, and extraction systems are more accurate. This suggests why published results disagree. At matched context, Jev selects as accurately as an LLM reranker (non-inferiority bound -2.0) at a third of the latency, and more accurately than a multi-call graph traversal. Reranking lowers correct abstention. Plans, code and graded answers are released.

Rishabh Sharma, Rishika Lall

Independent Researcher

Conversational Memory LLM Reranking Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 23, 2026cs.AI

TWIST: A Proposed Benchmark for Intervention Quality in Conversational Memory, with a Human-Validated Draft-Alignment

Long-conversation memory benchmarks increasingly test recall and prompted knowledge updates, and recent work studies evolving user beliefs and memory state. TWIST is a proposed benchmark suite for a complementary, unmeasured property: intervention quality -- whether a deployed memory system, exercised through its own ingest/recall/vet surface, acts correctly at belief change points. Four tracks cover unprompted tension detection, vetting outgoing drafts against the record, answering with current beliefs while preserving supersession history, and governing sensitive recall. The suite extends LoCoMo's corpora and harness, pairing every detect/block metric with a matched do-not-over-detect control: surface-matched hard negatives price false intervention, so no track can be gamed by flagging everything. The benchmark itself is validated first: independent, gold-blind double annotation with adjudication, judge decoy calibration, and a separability audit. On the human-validated Track B v1.0 key (161 items, post-adjudication kappa = 0.85), no tested configuration simultaneously achieves high contradiction recall, high hard-negative specificity, and high attribution: flat-RAG baselines detect 0.76-0.97 of true contradictions but falsely flag 16-43% of surface-matched safe drafts depending on backend, while a deployed coherence-oriented system almost never over-flags (0.98-1.00 specificity) yet catches 42% of true contradictions -- a trade-off no recall-only score can see. A 13-configuration baseline ladder localizes causes: every gold contradiction is detectable from its evidence alone (recall 1.000), calibrated models nearly solve the track given the full transcript -- consistent with substantial retrieval-coverage gaps -- and draft-only floors reveal model-dependent style priors. A system's TWIST profile, beside its recall score, measures whether memory knows when to intervene and when not to.

Subrat Panda

MindTwin

Conversational Memory Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 23, 2026cs.AI

EnSIMem: Entity-Structured Indexing for Long-Term Agent Memory

An agent that interacts with users over long periods must recall facts, preferences, events, and changes from a continuously growing interaction history. Existing memory systems often compress interactions into generic summaries or retrieve anonymous text chunks, making it difficult for an agent to identify the correct entity, property, and supporting evidence. We present EnSIMem, an entity-structured long-term memory architecture for an agent. During offline construction, the system organizes interactions into theme-coherent episodes and builds dialogue-grounded index entries of the form [entity][entity type][property:value]. Each entry preserves its source turns, temporal information, and available multimodal fields. During online interaction, the agent's request is decomposed into evidence requirements whose properties are aligned with the memory index. Entity-property lookup and adaptive retrieval then collect the evidence needed for point, temporal, compositional, and aggregation reasoning. The agent generates its response from the preserved source evidence rather than from lossy memory summaries. On long-term agent-memory benchmarks, EnSIMem achieves high answer accuracy while maintaining compact contexts and favorable online efficiency. These results show that entity-structured indexing and episode-level provenance provide a reliable foundation for long-term memory in agents. The code of our model is available at https://github.com/RamonMeng/EnSIMem.

Xuanyu Meng, Xing Fan, Xinyi Fan +3

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Amazon

Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 22, 2026cs.CL

SpeakerMem-R1: Speaker-Centered Dual-Track Memory for Multi-Party Dialogue

Long-term conversational memory in multi-party settings requires more than retrieving relevant content from long-term conversations: it must distinguish who said what, whom each statement concerns, how individuals perceive one another, what information is shared by the group, and how states change over time. Recent studies on multi-party dialogue benchmarks show that existing general-purpose LLM memory systems tend to lose person and group relations or struggle to integrate clues distributed across members, groups, and time. Together, these issues reveal two core bottlenecks: message attribution and relational understanding in multi-party dialogue, and state reconstruction from interleaved histories. To address both, we propose

\textbf{SpeakerMem-R1}

: its dual-track memory stores speaker-labeled verbatim messages and derived states organized into person-level and group-level views, then combines evidence from both tracks by entity, event, and time at query time. To reduce attribution and update errors during structured memory construction while enabling local deployment, we train Writer-R1 with SpeakerLevenshtein and speaker-conditioned GRPO. On GroupMemBench, SocialMemBench, and EverMemBench, SpeakerMem-R1 achieves binary accuracies of 47.9%, 69.2%, and 61.9%, respectively. On the publicly reported EverMemBench leaderboard from EverMind-AI, we achieves 62.33%, the best reported result among the latest state-of-the-art frameworks. It also achieves 70.85% on all 1,986 LoCoMo questions, which we use as a two-person long-term conversation boundary test. In a controlled evaluation of 305 questions, RL raises the SFT Writer's mean accuracy from 57.38% to 68.20%. We report both binary accuracy and token-F1, and ablations show that the verbatim and structured tracks, as well as person-level and group-level views, are complementary under the standardized evaluation interface.

Haobo Zheng, Tan Tang, Yan Chen +2

State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University

Conversational Memory LLM Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 20, 2026cs.CL

Propose, Verify, Commit: Evidence-Grounded Memory for Long-Horizon Multi-Actor Conversations

Long-horizon conversational memory is especially challenging in multi-actor settings, where relevant evidence is distributed across participants and contexts and previously established information may later be revised. We introduce EGMEMORY, which formulates long-horizon multi-actor memory as a searchable state machine that separates persistent message-level evidence from an explicit active state. At write time, adaptive state resolution and an evidence-grounded propose-verify-commit protocol govern how this state evolves. At read time, adaptive evidence navigation iteratively resolves the state and supporting evidence required for a query, using conversational structure to narrow the search space and lexical-semantic relevance to rank candidates. The system operates through prompting and tool use without memory-specific policy training. EGMEMORY achieves 68.2% on GroupMemBench and 77.9% on EverMemBench, outperforming the strongest evaluated baselines by 22.7 and 21.4 percentage points, respectively. It further reaches 73.6% on the dyadic LoCoMo benchmark, demonstrating generalization beyond multi-actor conversations. We will release the codebase upon formal publication.

Zihao Lu, Zhihang Yuan, Lei Shi

Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, China

Conversational Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models State Tracking Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 17, 2026cs.CL

JustMem: Just-Enough Memory Access for Long-Term Conversations

Efficient long-term conversational memory requires retrieving sufficient evidence without indiscriminately expanding the context presented to the language model. This is challenging because relevant evidence may be distributed across multiple sessions, while compression may discard details needed for answering. Different queries therefore require different forms of memory access. To capture these demands, we formulate memory access along two dimensions: discovery breadth, which controls how broadly evidence is searched, and reading fidelity, which controls whether evidence is read in compact form or recovered from the original conversation. Based on this formulation, we introduce JustMem, which stores conversation history as compact atomic memories and adapts memory access along these two dimensions to each query. Specifically, LOOKUP handles local evidence, COMPOSE broadens discovery for distributed evidence, and REPLAY increases reading fidelity for fidelity-sensitive evidence. On LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S, JustMem achieves the highest mean accuracy and retrieval recall among the compared memory systems while using substantially fewer generative-model tokens for memory construction and inference.

Guanhua Chen, Yanting Wang, Wenjing Zhi +1

Beihang University

Conversational Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory Agent Memory Management

Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

Disentangling Long-Term Memory via Latent Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning

Personalized agents are required to reason over long-term history interactions to infer both explicit preferences and implicit behavioral evidence. While early flat retrieval methods score memory fragments independently and neglect the distributed information, current structured memory frameworks rely on query-agnostic static graphs that fail to capture the context-dependent relations. Crucially, raw textual memories are inherently entangled and noisy, making fine-grained personalization and cross-session reasoning computationally prohibitive. To this end, we present LGM, a novel neuro-symbolic framework that shifts long-term memory disentanglement into a continuous latent space. Specifically, (i) instead of persisting fixed graphs, we design a tailored latent graph construction with a sparse autoencoder. Subject to each query, it maps historical interactions into latent memory nodes and disentangles the memory traces into sparse concept activations, dynamically synthesizing query-aware relational edge weights. (ii) A graph encoder then treats the query embedding as a conditioning preference to direct non-linear message passing across the task-specific latent subgraph. This yields a highly expressive memory representation for effective activations. Extensive experiments on long-term personalization benchmarks demonstrate that LGM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in capturing both explicit and implicit preferences while enabling personalized responses.

Cai Ke, Xinghao Chen, Xiaoyu Shen +6

Tencent Youtu Lab · Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Industrial Intelligence and Digital Twin, EIT, Ningbo, China · Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China +1

Graph-Based Agent Memory Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

Memory Has Geometry: Non-Uniform Geometric Memory for Long-Horizon Personalized AI

Long-term memory is becoming a core substrate for personalized AI, yet most systems still represent personalization as discrete records in a largely static latent space, accessed under one global similarity notion. For data mining, this creates a mismatch: the evidence is a temporal event stream, while the dominant abstraction is a searchable record set. We argue that long-horizon personalization should instead model memory as a user-specific dynamical state space with locally heterogeneous geometry. Geometry here is a computational language, not a literal claim about cognition: it captures stable versus volatile regions, variable-rate drift, heterogeneous neighborhoods, and uncertainty about current user state. Profiles and isolated events remain useful as points, but interaction, feedback, and elapsed time induce trajectories. Memory access then becomes trajectory-conditioned reconstruction of the relevant user state, not only nearest-neighbor lookup.

Jiahong Liu, Wenhao Yu, Zexuan Qiu +2

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

Neural Representation Geometry LLM Personalization User Modeling Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

Interactive Memory Learning for Long-Term Conversations

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly enhanced the capabilities of agents in modeling long-term conversations. Despite these successes, existing approaches typically adopt a static heuristic paradigm, where information is passively archived without adaptive memory valuation. Consequently, these methods fail to self-evolve or align their memory management with evolving user needs. To address this, we propose ICML (InteraCtive Memory Learning), a multi-agent framework that transforms the memory mechanism from a passive archive into a learnable, interactive memory policy. Specifically, we first employ a session synthesis pipeline to generate expert data, facilitating rapid test-time adaptation in unseen scenarios. Building on this, ICML utilizes an online reinforcement learning mechanism where a Planner agent selectively encodes high-value information and a Trigger agent dynamically retrieves it to optimize response quality, whereby the two agents co-evolve through continuous interaction feedback. Crucially, both agents are synchronized through a delayed reward mechanism that propagates future feedback back to earlier storage decisions, ensuring memory policies are precisely aligned with user expectations. Experimental results demonstrate that ICML significantly outperforms strong baselines, exhibiting the unique capability to continuously improve response quality as interactions accumulate.

Cai Ke, Jiangyue Yan, Han Zhang +5

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Long-Term Conversational Memory RL for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

ThinkFlow: Self-Evolving Probabilistic Latent Memory for Lifelong Conversational Agents

Lifelong conversational agents rely on memory systems to maintain deep, context-aware interactions with users. However, existing explicit textual memory pipelines suffer from a severe information bottleneck, often losing subtle behavioral patterns and emotional shifts. Furthermore, being typically static post-deployment, they cannot autonomously adapt to personal habits and preferences without manual feedback. Cognitive science, however, suggests that humans maintain mental models purely in a latent space and continuously refine them through predictive coding. Inspired by this, we propose \textbf{ThinkFlow}, a novel end-to-end latent memory framework for lifelong conversational agents. ThinkFlow bypasses the text bottleneck by dynamically compressing conversational flows into probabilistic latent memory skills, autonomously consolidating complex user states into disentangled, continuous vectors without semantic interference. To break this barrier, we introduce a test-time evolution paradigm. By coupling teacher-guided latent alignment to bootstrap the initial state with a self-supervised next-user-utterance prediction task for continuous refinement, the framework successfully overcomes cold-start challenges and achieves label-free lifelong personalization. Extensive experiments on long-term conversation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkFlow significantly outperforms prevailing memory systems, providing highly personalized and contextually accurate responses over extended multi-session interactions.

Cai Ke, Xin Liu, Han Zhang +6

Pengcheng Laboratory, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · China Unicom Greater Bay Area Innovation Institute, China

Test-Time Adaptation Lifelong Learning Agents Long-Term Conversational Memory Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

LSREP: A Longitudinal State-Replay Protocol for Evaluating Conversational Memory, with ICE v2 as an Audited Local-First Architecture

Conversational memory changes during use, so endpoint question answering alone cannot establish how a persistent state accumulates, ages, or incorporates revisions. We introduce LSREP, a Longitudinal State-Replay Evaluation Protocol combining ordered replay, explicit lifecycle schedules, repeated probes, evolving reference answers, and mechanism-fidelity checks. Its architectural case study is ICE v2, a local-first memory middleware with typed stores, retrieval fusion, and dynamic context budgets. The private, single-user instantiation contains 1,985 turns, 219 distinct probes, and 1,211 probe-checkpoint observations across 52 checkpoints. On three ordinary-density datasets, ICE v2 has a near-zero mean quality difference from vector-RAG while selecting 32% fewer fragments but using 6.6% more estimated prompt tokens. A fourth, dense dataset exposes catastrophic failures of the unbudgeted baseline. The fidelity audit limits attribution: procedural retrieval is defective, several mechanisms are unexercised, and graph utility is not established. In a complementary matched public diagnostic, ICE v2 loses decisively to pure vector-RAG on LongMemEval: 50.8% versus 72.8% in the evidence-only oracle and 43.0% versus 69.5% in full-S. Paired differences are -22.0 points (95% CI [-26.6, -17.4]) and -26.5 ([-31.3, -21.8]). Conservative abstention accompanies severe multi-session and temporal failures. ICE uses less context in this diagnostic, establishing a quality-cost trade-off rather than superior efficiency. Together, replay, fidelity auditing, and public endpoint testing expose distinct failure modes that neither architectural descriptions nor aggregate scores identify alone.

Deepesh Sonar

Thakur College of Engineering and Technology, Computer Engineering, Mumbai, India

Conversational Memory Memory Agent Benchmarks Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

CueMem: Cue-Guided Context Reconstruction for Long-Term Conversational Memory

Long-term conversational agents must answer user queries by recalling information from extended dialogue histories, yet directly using the full history is costly and often unreliable, while compressed memory units may lose fine-grained evidence needed for question answering. Motivated by the reconstructive view of autobiographical memory, we propose CueMem, a cue-guided framework that treats extracted memory records as retrieval cues rather than self-contained evidence and reconstructs query-relevant dialogue context from their source turns. During memory construction, CueMem extracts fine-grained memory cues from dialogue turns and links each cue to its source turn. At query time, it retrieves query-relevant cues, maps them to source-turn anchors, and expands from these anchors over a turn graph that captures temporal proximity and semantic relatedness, reconstructing a compact evidence context from the original dialogue for LLM answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that CueMem consistently outperforms representative long-term memory baselines. Further analyses show that graph-based context reconstruction helps recover supporting dialogue evidence while reducing query-time input tokens and latency compared with the full-history LLM setting. These results highlight retrieval cues as an effective alternative to self-contained memory evidence for long-term conversational question answering.

Changjian Wang, Rongzhen Li, Weili Guan +3

Mashang Consumer Finance Co., Ltd. · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen

Conversational Memory Long-Term Conversational Memory

Sep 10, 2026cs.AI

PRAGMA: Evaluating Personalized Guidance with Memory Alignment in Lifelong Conversations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as personalized assistants that interact with users over extended periods of time. As conversations grow longer, relying on full interaction histories becomes increasingly inefficient and unreliable: long contexts introduce substantial computational overhead, making it difficult for models to consistently identify and utilize the most relevant information for the current request. These challenges have motivated memory systems that structure and retrieve user-specific information. In realistic interactions, users often seek practical guidance such as recommendations, planning, and decision support. Unlike factual recall tasks, personalized guidance requires models to integrate information across multiple past conversations and reason about changing user preferences and experiences. However, existing conversational memory evaluations mainly focus on retrieval and factual recall. To study this challenge, we introduce PRAGMA, a benchmark for evaluating personalized guidance in long-term conversations. PRGAMA contains curated longitudinal conversation histories, evidence annotations, and guidance scenarios grounded in evolving user contexts and incorrect user assumptions. Experiments across retrieval systems, memory systems, and long-context models reveal that current systems struggle both to recover the appropriate conversational evidence and to effectively use it for personalized guidance. Our results highlight the need for memory architectures that support robust conversational retrieval and memory-grounded reasoning beyond evidence recall.

Hyojeong Yu, Hyukhun Koh, Minsung Kim +2

Dept. of ECE, Seoul National University · IPAI, Seoul National University

Conversational Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Term Conversational Memory