Memory Agent Benchmarks

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16 papers in the last four weeks, up 167% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 90

Oct 7, 2026cs.LG

MemoWM: How World Models Change What Agents Need to Remember

Long-term agents face growing storage demands as they accumulate experience. World models capture reusable regularities that can reduce the information stored for each experience. We formulate the problem of memory allocation conditioned on a world model and introduce MemoWM, a framework that uses shared predictions to compress retained information and reconstruct omitted content. Its task-aware allocation rule balances the expected impact of reconstruction errors against storage cost, retaining information with downstream value beyond the predictive prior. Across five long-term agent-memory benchmarks, MemoWM achieves 42.42% average answer accuracy, exceeding the strongest baseline by 2.62 percentage points, while reducing average experience-specific storage by 53.9% relative to MIRIX, the most storage-efficient baseline. Further analysis shows that stronger world models reduce per-experience storage at comparable task quality. Accounting for model parameters reveals a trade-off between shared model capacity and recurring storage costs, with the capacity that minimizes total storage increasing as more interactions are retained. Our code is available at https://github.com/Feld-maxiu/MemoWM.
Oct 6, 2026cs.AI

Bookkeeping, Composition, or Unreachable Gold? Reading MemoryAgentBench's Conflict-Resolution Scores Against a Frozen Last-Write Resolver

MemoryAgentBench's Conflict Resolution split is read as measuring "selective forgetting". We execute the benchmark's own rule - the newest statement about a fact wins - as a zero-learning resolver frozen on one of the four fact lists. Under the official metric the rule answers 80.25% of the questions (74.5% on the three held-out lists). Of the rest, 67 items have a released gold that the last-write graph cannot reach but overwritten statements would ("The capital of India is New Delhi." superseded by "The capital of India is Grosseto."; gold New Delhi); such items are a third of the multi-hop questions at 262K. Two long-context models and our pre-registered approximate re-implementation of the benchmark's BM25 agent, one retained run per item and outcomes only, score 84.7%, 82.6% and 41.6% on the items the rule solves against 10.4%, 11.9% and 6.0% on those 67. The failures are a reachability split plus a small parser-scope residual; the per-item split, not the aggregate, is the unit at which a score here can be read.
Oct 6, 2026cs.AI

Persistent Memory in Multi-Agent LLM Inference: What It Costs, What It Buys, and When You Can Tell

Decomposing long-context inference across cooperating agents bounds the active KV cache per call rather than total evidence, which matters when KV-cache memory binds. Many such systems add a persistent tier storing and recalling reasoning traces, usually validated by an ablation reporting an accuracy gain. We measure both on one three-tier agent architecture. Decomposition delivers: peak KV working set of 14.3 MiB per query against 35.5 and 35.3 MiB for single-pass and retrieval-augmented baselines. The persistent tier does not: across eight controlled dataset pairs at n=100 per arm it costs +0.368 MiB [+0.167, +0.590] of peak cache and produces no detectable accuracy change (+0.015, 95% CI [-0.011, +0.046]). We argue the null is structural: single-question benchmarks supply each item with its own evidence and score it independently, and correctness requires resetting stored traces between conditions, so recall has nothing informative to retrieve. Reaching it took four measurement corrections -- three inflating the apparent benefit, the fourth making an effect that size look resolvable -- none visible in the results table. We give the conditions an agent-memory ablation must satisfy and detection procedures that need no knowledge of the specific defect.
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.
Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

PACMI: Provenance-Aware Cascading Memory Invalidation for Long-Term LLM Agents

LLM agents rely on long-term memory to retain and reuse information when performing tasks over long horizons. Existing methods provide limited support for handling memories that become outdated as new observations or domain evidence arrive. Such outdated memories may remain semantically relevant, continue to affect dependent records, and retain value as historical evidence. This calls for two capabilities: dependency tracking to identify downstream effects and historical preservation to retain useful past records. We propose Provenance-Aware Cascading Memory Invalidation (PACMI), a framework that represents memories and new evidence in a provenance graph with typed dependency edges. PACMI assigns records to a four-state validity lattice, propagates validity changes to dependent memories, and uses the resulting states for retrieval and stale-premise detection. We also introduce a diagnostic benchmark with 100 cases and 300 queries across five domains. The evaluation separates node, context-, and answer-level performance. PACMI achieves the highest final-answer accuracy on this benchmark, and its paired difference from the strongest baseline is significant under an exact McNemar test. The premise checker achieves perfect precision, recall, and F 1 on the controlled query distribution. Cascading propagation primarily improves memorystate correctness: removing it increases final-answer errors from 3 to 11, but the paired difference does not reach the 0.05 significance threshold. Code and data will be made publicly available.
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.
Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

What Should an Agent Remember? Disentangling Retention from Retrieval in Bounded-Memory Evaluation

A persistent agent must decide both what to retain as information arrives and what to surface once a query appears, yet memory evaluations can confound these decisions by comparing methods that differ in both retention and selection. We build a streaming-recall benchmark crossing retention and selection rules and evaluate every condition on the same 300 seeded episodes. Holding access fixed, query-aware selection improves required-fact recall by 15.5 percentage points (95% CI: 12.8 to 18.2), whereas a mixed comparison that also changes history access reports a 68.7-point advantage, of which 53.2 points are attributable to access. Under bounded retention, query-aware, dense, and oracle selection reach the retention ceiling, and all 319 observed failures in the bounded recency condition are caused by eviction rather than ranking errors. Recall falls to 0% as targets recede sufficiently far into the past. Repeating the evaluation on SQuAD preserves the retention ceiling while showing that dense retrieval can outperform lexical retrieval on natural text. These results show that bounded-memory evaluations should hold access fixed and report retention and selection separately.
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.
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.
Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

APM-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-session Persistent Memory for Egocentric Streaming Video Assistants

To serve as real-world personal assistants, streaming video models need persistent memory that retains past experiences for later use. Yet existing streaming benchmarks and methods often focus on individual continuous videos or short clips, overlooking that real-world interactions are often intermittent and require memory to persist across interruptions. To fill this gap, we introduce APM-Bench, which reformulates real-world streaming interaction as multi-session life trajectories. It contains 549 sessions, 104 trajectories, and 2,719 candidates, spanning both objective and open-ended questions. Each session is a video with fine-grained annotations, and sessions within a trajectory revolve around related activities. Models then use persistent memory to answer questions about past sessions and provide proactive responses while maintaining real-time interaction. This raises challenges: persistent memory must be storable, selectively retain information, be injected at the right time, and remain efficient. Moreover, finite storage may leave required evidence unavailable, so assistants should recognize missing evidence. Therefore, we systematically evaluate general video models under different memory protocols and diverse specialized streaming memory systems, and test whether models acknowledge insufficient evidence. Our evaluation reveals a clear utility--latency--storage trade-off: existing methods still struggle to simultaneously achieve reliable long-term recall, low overhead, and effective proactive assistance across sessions. APM-Bench provides a comprehensive testbed for developing and comparing persistent memory systems under realistic streaming conditions. We hope it encourages future work that jointly considers utility, latency, and storage toward more practical persistent memory for real-world streaming assistants.
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.
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.
Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

RoutePrism: Tracing Construction Order Effects in Agent Memory

Processing the same records in a different order can discard different evidence, yet endpoint accuracy alone cannot reveal what changed or whether it mattered. We introduce RoutePrism, a diagnostic protocol that builds memory twice from the same source pool in two processing orders, then traces which sources, compiled contexts, and answers differ. Because record content, timestamps, policy, and the answer model all stay fixed, any observed difference is localized to the memory construction step. A matched four-condition intervention tests whether a record displaced by reordering actually carried task-relevant evidence: restoring that single record recovers over 60 percentage points of lost accuracy, while substituting a non-supporting record of equal length does not. We evaluate the protocol on PersonaMem-32K (63 primary queries, 29 users) and 470 LongMemEval-S questions with histories spanning 38 to 62 sessions, replicating the core intervention across five answer models. Survivor selection, defined as the choice of which record a cluster retains, drives most source-level changes, while different memory policies (compaction, bounded recency, MemoChat-style summarization, A-MEM) produce distinct failure signatures at the source, context, and metadata layers.
Sep 27, 2026cs.MA

TRACE: Governing Memory Validity in Evolving Multi-Agent Systems

Persistent memory lets language-model agents carry information across long-running collaborations, but leaves a lifecycle question open: what may a returning agent still act on once the shared state has changed? A memory can be correctly retrieved, relevant to the current task, and faithful to its source, and nonetheless be inadmissible for action: an itinerary saved before a pause still names the hotel the team has since replaced. We formalize this as temporal memory admission and present TRACE, a training-free layer that treats re-entry as an eligibility decision rather than a storage or retrieval operation, reconciling a departure checkpoint against absence-period updates, resolving explicit and implicit invalidation, and releasing a bounded Return View only when it covers the returning role's open obligations. We evaluate TRACE under three actor models on Memora, STALE Type II, and a derived ManBench-Return setting, each recast as return episodes: one agent departs, four teammates change the shared state, and the agent rejoins. What separates methods is not overall accuracy but whether one can retain valid memory and reject stale memory at once, and no single-policy baseline can: Restore (reinstate the departure checkpoint in full) admits stale state, Reset (start the return from an empty memory) discards valid state, each bottoming out at 0% on one of the two. TRACE is the only method high on both, reaching 92.6-98.3% valid-information availability with 98.4-99.5% invalid-information rejection on ManBench-Return, within 3.8 points of the best baseline's overall accuracy. On STALE Type II it improves Overall over the strongest comparison policy by 22.3 (Qwen), 18.5 (Gemini), and 27.5 (DeepSeek) points at roughly 2.3 times their tokens, while a write-time consolidation pipeline is more accurate still at 3.99 times TRACE's.
Sep 26, 2026cs.AI

CoMemBench: Benchmarking Collaborative Memory Boundaries across Multi-Agent Workflow Topologies

Multi-agent workflows require task-relevant information to be shared across agents, while irrelevant, stale, unverified, or incompatible information must remain isolated. We call this task-conditioned scope of information a collaborative memory boundary. Workflow topology determines which intermediate artifacts are applicable to which downstream workers and when they cease to be valid, thereby providing a structural stress dimension for sharing and isolation. Existing memory benchmarks primarily evaluate retention and retrieval, whereas multi-agent benchmarks emphasize coordination and end-to-end completion, leaving topology-conditioned memory boundaries largely unmeasured. We introduce CoMemBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for collaborative memory sharing and isolation across multi-agent workflow topologies. It constructs 800 composite workflows across four domains from source-grounded dependency graphs, with node-local specifications, verifiable artifact handoffs, native evaluators, and matched isolation challenges. CoMemBench measures workflow completion, verified node progress, required-handoff reliability, isolation robustness, and token cost. Experiments reveal a sharing-isolation trade-off: broader context improves information availability but can weaken isolation, while system rankings shift across topologies and artifact violations.
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.
Sep 22, 2026cs.MA

EPGM: Execution Provenance for Budgeted Agent Memory Retrieval

A language agent's execution history can exceed its context window, requiring its memory system to retrieve complete supporting evidence under a hard token budget. Evidence may span multiple execution events, yet conventional retrievers use fixed token windows and fixed-k metrics that reward individual fragments without showing whether the complete evidence set fits in context. Smaller windows reduce irrelevant text but scatter evidence across candidates, while flat-versus-graph comparisons can conflate candidate design with graph propagation. To address these limitations, we formulate agent-memory retrieval as budgeted evidence completion and score exact gold spans in shared source coordinates. We first construct source-aligned provenance units from tool arguments and outputs. We then apply a zero-initialized residual R-GCN to refine frozen dense-retrieval scores over typed provenance edges. We evaluate 2,000 span-grounded memory queries over 1,207 held-out execution-grounded ISETrace trajectories. With matched Dense-FT scoring, provenance units improve Full Support@2048 by 19.07 points over flat 512-token windows and remain 11.96 points above a per-metric oracle over four flat chunk sizes; the pattern also holds with cross-encoder scoring. Holding the candidates and seed scores fixed, graph propagation adds 4.55 points in Full Support@2048 (95% CI [2.98, 6.18]). This gain is concentrated when gold evidence spans multiple events; entity co-occurrence expansion produces no comparable benefit, and relation and topology controls confirm dependence on typed transformations and observed graph structure. Overall, source-aligned candidates address the dominant granularity trade-off, while graph-conditioned propagation adds a smaller, targeted benefit for distributed evidence.
Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

DolphinBench: Mapping the Pareto Frontier of Agent Memory

Agents today often take real-world actions that depend on long-term memory and context recall over time. However, most current memory benchmarks are built for a conversational question-answer format, where the question itself signals that some fact must be retrieved, and often which one. Moreover, benchmarks rarely require anything beyond accuracy from submissions, allowing memory systems to make unreasonable cost/time tradeoffs to achieve higher scores. We present DolphinBench, a benchmark that evaluates memory directly through an agent's task completion. DolphinBench includes three knowledge-work personas with roughly 500k tokens of user messages per persona and evaluates agents on tasks that depend on information from that history. We verify all 200 tasks per persona by running an agent with and without the relevant history, requiring success with it and failure without it. Finally, we require all evaluations to report total cost and latency alongside accuracy, which enables us to evaluate agent memory systems holistically. No existing memory benchmark combines all three. The dataset and evaluation code are available at https://dolphinbench.ai.
Sep 21, 2026cs.LG

MemCalib: Benchmarking and Optimizing Memory Use in LLM Agents

The effectiveness of agent memory ultimately depends on whether the underlying LLM gives each memory in context an appropriate degree of influence over its response. Yet this capability has remained largely overlooked. To assess this capability, we introduce MemCalib, a benchmark grounded in realistic memory-system scenarios for evaluating memory use and advancing optimization algorithms. Results on the MemCalib test set reveal that frontier open- and closed-source models struggle to use memory appropriately. They frequently over-use or under-use memory rather than matching each proposition's actual use to its target level, leading to biased, low-quality responses. Experiments with common post-training algorithms, including group relative policy optimization and on-policy self-distillation, further reveal a clear directional skew: trained models improve in one direction while deteriorating in the other. We therefore propose MemCalib-RL, an ordered bidirectional counterfactual credit-assignment algorithm that separates over- and under-use signals and localizes their credit to response tokens through exact atom ablation. Results across model families and scales (Qwen3-8B, Ministral-3-8B-Instruct, and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B) show that MemCalib-RL achieves the best overall performance while better balancing over-use and under-use, with gains generalizing beyond MemCalib in external benchmark evaluation. Further experiments support its design choices and robustness and provide insight into its training dynamics.
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.
Sep 9, 2026cs.AI

Fortunate Recall: Ontology-Driven Memory Lifecycle Management for Persistent Coherence in LLMs

Current LLM memory systems treat all personal facts identically, so stores grow without bound while retrieval precision degrades. The core challenge is lifecycle management: which memories should persist, which should be replaced, and at what rate, conditioned on the behavioral type of each fact. Fortunate Recall (FR) is a composable policy layer that classifies personal facts into a 10+1 behavioral ontology and applies category-specific lifecycle policies (differential temporal decay, slot-key supersession, event-time validity, and category-aware retrieval routing) as deterministic functions over LLM-extracted metadata. FR-Bank, our infrastructure-independent implementation, reaches a 76.9% pass rate on LifecycleBench, a new 516-question temporal-disambiguation benchmark, ahead of Mem0, A-MEM, Memory-R1, and MemoryOS (61% to 70.5%), and 75.2% on the full LongMemEval-S under the canonical Wu et al. judge protocol, so lifecycle policies impose no measurable cost on standard retrieval. A pre-registered ablation locates the gains: replacing the typed layer with three generic lifecycle primitives leaves correctness statistically unchanged (-1.7pp, 95% CI [-6.0, +2.7]), so the generic lifecycle metadata carries the correctness advantage, while the behavioral ontology carries calibration, halving downstream confabulation (12.0% vs 24.2%, p<0.001). End-to-end, FR-Bank cuts confabulation from Mem0's 45.1% to 22.4% over answered queries and from 32.2% to 13.0% over all queries while answering more of them correctly (31.2% vs 18.6%); the ranking replicates on the open-weight Kimi K2.5. The decomposition transfers to BEAM, an independently built benchmark: 46.8% correct vs Mem0's 32.9% over 280 questions, with the ontology's benefit concentrated in contradiction resolution and saturating near seven policy clusters. The ontology, benchmark, and code are released.
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

ICM-Bench: Person-Level Identity Reasoning in Multimodal Agents with Long-Term Memory

Long-horizon multimodal agents should remember not only what happened but also who participated. This capability depends on linking recurring faces, voices, names, person-associated objects, events, and social relations to consistent identities over time. Existing long-video and multimodal-agent benchmarks measure broad memory question answering, but they do not isolate the ability to maintain recurring person identities and reason over their cross-time relations. We introduce ICM-Bench (Identity-Centric Memory Benchmark), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate identity-centric reasoning over long video memories in multimodal agents. The benchmark contains 839 synthetic clips spanning 141 minutes and 1,217 open-ended questions about six recurring adults in a one-year life album. A theme-configurable pipeline generates the video collection and associates each question with its target identities and traceable supporting evidence. We compare direct caption-memory baselines, memory-augmented agents, and graph-retrieval systems. Gemini 3.1 Pro achieves the highest overall accuracy of 74.0%, yet its score falls to 60.3% on questions that require long-term identity profiles. The results show that current systems recover many event-level memories but remain less reliable when evidence must be accumulated around a stable person.
Sep 3, 2026cs.CL

When Users Don't Ask: Benchmarking Context-Driven Memory Retrieval in Conversational Agents

Large language models (LLMs) are increas- ingly deployed as long-horizon conversational agents, motivating growing interest in mem- ory systems. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate memory through QA-style probing rather than in-situ conversational usage. We introduce LOCOMO-CONV, a conversa- tional memory benchmark derived from Lo- CoMo with four query styles: dialog, implicit, counterfactual, and composed. Across five rep- resentative memory systems, we evaluate both retrieval recall and end-to-end response qual- ity. Our experiments show that conversational framing exposes substantial retrieval gaps over- looked by QA benchmarks, especially on im- plicit and composed queries, which multi-facet query rewriting narrows for raw-turn mem- ory but not abstractive memory. We further find that strong retrieval does not fully trans- late into response quality, and that implicit queries exhibit silent grounding, where mem- ory improves contextual grounding without ex- plicitly surfacing the gold fact. These results point to reasoning-based memory elaboration as a promising direction, and we release aux- iliary supportive_memory annotations captur- ing conversationally useful context beyond the original gold evidence.
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

Making Prospective Memory SLM-Shaped: Typed Intention Stores for Small-Model Agents

Prospective memory means carrying out a deferred intention at the right future cue while other work continues. Benchmarks now isolate it as an agent skill, yet frontier LLMs still struggle: the best published PM-Bench scaffold reaches only 65.1% Set-F1. We argue that this loop is schema-constrained state tracking rather than open-ended reasoning, and that small models can execute it when the action space is typed. We propose the Prospective Intention Store (PIS) that puts lifecycle logic in code and scoped language work on the model. The scaffold is agentic and training-free: no selector fine-tuning and no trajectory distillation. On PM-Bench, DeepSeek-Chat with PIS reaches 82.9% Set-F1. On Gemma-E2B, Set-F1 is only 4.2% without a store and at most 6.6% under seven retrospective memories, while PIS reaches 66.2%. PIS further reaches 70.1% Set-F1, where retrospective memory methods stay at most 54.4%. PIS sets a new state of the art on this benchmark and enables small models to surpass the published large-model scaffold.
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

UTILMEM: Benchmarking Evidence Utilization in Long-Term Conversational Memory

Long-term memory is increasingly important for conversational agents, yet existing benchmarks primarily measure memory through pointwise factual recall: whether a system can recover isolated facts or event-level details from prior interactions. Real-world memory use, however, often requires a more demanding capability: integrating distributed, implicit, and noisy evidence across extended interaction histories into coherent, task-oriented outputs. We call this capability memory utilization. Here, we introduce UtilMem, a diagnostic benchmark comprising 1,717 instances across five domains, designed to evaluate four underexplored aspects of memory utilization: reasoning over dense histories, identifying implicitly relevant memories, synthesizing distributed evidence into summaries, analyses, or plans, and resisting interference from semantically similar distractors. Evaluating a diverse set of retrieval-based and memory-augmented systems, we find that strong performance on conventional factual-memory benchmarks does not reliably translate into effective memory utilization. Moreover, retrieval alone is insufficient: even when relevant evidence is successfully recovered, systems frequently fail to integrate information across sessions or to distinguish useful evidence from plausible distractors. These findings expose a substantial gap between accessing stored information and using it effectively, and suggest that progress in long-term conversational memory will require architectures that explicitly support evidence integration and robustness to retrieval interference. Code is available at https://github.com/peijunallin/UtilMem.
Aug 12, 2026cs.AI

Governed Persistent Memory: Source-Bound State Semantics and Fail-Closed Release for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-term agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim. We introduce Governed Persistent Memory (GPM), an auditable bitemporal state-transition model with source-bound admission, derived lifecycle state, current public barriers, and fail-closed structured release. Five executable clauses cover ledger integrity, source binding, conflict isolation, non-revival after retraction or deletion, and exact claim closure over a fresh view at one verified head. On a prespecified hash-frozen 3,600-case GPM-ReleaseBench, GPM matches all complete outcomes; the strongest of three intentionally simple complete policies matches 1,800/3,600 and makes unmatched releases on 50% of violation cases. A separate sealed end-to-end service evaluation exercises real ingestion and release across eight query families. In its publicly disclosed V3 arm, the governed lane is correct on 2,400/2,400 clusters versus 600/2,400 for ungoverned local Qwen2.5-7B; it repairs all 1,800 baseline failures with no regression (one-sided 95% lower bounds 99.875% and 99.834%). A later V5 reseal over Chinese- and English-command arms, with generation-date pinning and no post-freeze reducer amendment, again obtains 2,400/2,400 per arm. A production-code-independent finite model explores 331,776 semantic and 1,990,656 query states without a full-contract counterexample, and a 100,000-trace three-engine differential yields zero mismatches. These are bounded contract and implementation results, not open-world model accuracy or evidence of world truth. Governed answers in the sealed service evaluation are deterministic service outputs; the 7B result is the ungoverned comparison, not a claim that a language model itself became perfectly accurate.
Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

Total Recall at What Cost? Benchmarking the Serving Cost of Agentic Memory Systems

Long-running conversational agents increasingly rely on a memory system to avoid resending the whole conversation each turn, yet how much that costs to serve has received little systematic benchmarking. We compare three memory systems (Mem0, Hindsight, and Mastra Observational Memory) against two reference strategies -- a fixed-size rolling window and resubmitting the full transcript -- across two backbones and conversations of up to 400 turns, pairing every cost measurement with answer accuracy on 665 LoCoMo questions. First, a memory system's serving cost cannot be predicted from conversation length and message size alone: a regression that tracks the two reference strategies closely misses the memory systems by 18-69%, their cost driven instead by internal memory behavior. Second, a break-even analysis shows that whether -- and when -- a memory system becomes cheaper to serve than the full transcript is highly sensitive to the system and the backbone, from the first tens of turns for the cheapest to never within 400 turns for the most expensive. Third, no system wins on both axes: accuracy spans 21-54%, and the backbone choice drives cost as much as the memory system does.
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

SodaMem: Evidence-Grounded Temporal Graph Memory for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents that assist users over weeks of conversation must remember what is currently true, not merely what was once said. Flat RAG diaries and Markdown logs optimize needle retrieval but under-serve currency, provenance, and ordered temporal reasoning (Maharana et al. 2024; Wu et al. 2024; Packer et al. 2023; Chhikara et al. 2025). We present SodaMem, an evidence-grounded temporal graph memory that (i) extracts typed FactEvents with mandatory provenance spans, (ii) persists mention time, occurrence time, and validity with SUPERSEDES/CONTRADICTS/UPDATES edges under hybrid lexical-dense indexing, and (iii) answers via a planner-reader loop that gathers citable evidence before composing a final response. On LongMemEval-S, our store-of-record configuration reaches 92.8% accuracy (464/500; best of N=3) at mean 0.00161/question(approximately18.3ktokens;median0.00161/question (approximately 18.3k tokens; median 0.00111 / approximately 14.6k) with deepseek-v4-flash. We compile public systems with estimable API cost into a cost table and cost-accuracy map; under these estimates SodaMem sits near the accuracy frontier at Flash-tier spend and strictly dominates several higher-cost, lower-accuracy points. Accuracy uses the same Flash model as reader and judge (self-grading); costs exclude ingest/judge and cross-system comparisons are compiled estimates rather than a single-harness bake-off.Our code is available at https://github.com/SodaMem/SodaMem
Aug 7, 2026cs.CL

From Test-Time Scaling to Reusable Memory: Measuring Crystallization in Text-to-SQL

Test-time scaling can correct difficult text-to-SQL queries, but the extra computation is normally discarded after each answer. Systems increasingly retain verified repair episodes, yet evaluations still report one end-to-end score. It cannot distinguish replay on recurring questions from help on unseen questions, or identify the responsible memory choice. We call measuring this future value the crystallization problem. Our controlled evaluation holds the single-shot solver fixed and varies one memory choice at a time. We separately measure replay, cross-question retention, and held-out same-database transfer. On BIRD, storing verified corrected queries improves held-out first-attempt accuracy by 4.34 percentage points. This gain captures 44.4% of the accuracy headroom provided by on-demand repair on the same questions. Controlled interventions identify database-specific content as the main operating ingredient. Reliable verification and broader retrieval coverage yield supported gains; richer formats and elaborate retrievers do not. Open-source code, evaluation artifacts, and reproduction instructions are available at https://github.com/ai-jiaqian/text-to-sql-memory-crystallization.
Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

ContextWeave: A Real-World Workflow Benchmark

Memory is essential as language agents move from isolated tasks to long-horizon, stateful workflows, yet existing evaluations often reduce it to retrieval or question answering. We introduce ContextWeave, a longitudinal benchmark that evaluates whether recalled experience improves downstream agent performance in realistic office-work streams. ContextWeave reconstructs privacy-preserved, multi-month workflows of 14 participants into 1,005 executable tasks, including 568 core evaluation tasks, with instructions, containerized environments, trajectories, and task-specific rubrics. It measures workspace quality and alignment with participant-specific preferences, complemented by diagnostics of relevance, continuity, solvability, and robustness to misleading recall. Across six memory components under a fixed model, the strongest configuration raises Workspace Score from 68.08 to 78.20 and Preference Score from 41.50 to 70.60. With a fixed memory component, recall improves both outcomes for all five tested base models, although gains vary substantially. Our analysis shows that actionable, experience-rich memory supports workflow continuation and reduces redundant exploration more effectively than compact summaries, while it can also be more susceptible to misleading recall. These findings motivate memory systems that optimize not only retrieval relevance but also reliable use during execution.