Gist-based context compression---summarising older conversation history into compact representations---is a common approach in long-horizon language model agents, yet its effect on different types of memory retrieval is poorly understood. We use Salience-Weighted Consolidation (SWC), a biologically-inspired compression framework motivated by sleep-based memory consolidation, as a diagnostic probe to study when gist compression helps and when it hurts.
arXiv:2610.08586v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long conversational agents have become essential in our daily lives. They must remember what was said long back in order to help us efficiently complet...
By Sujato Dutta, Sreekruthy Tummala, Shashank Vanga, Ayushmi Pavani
arXiv:2606. 15405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term memory is essential for conversational agents to remain coherent across extended dialogues, follow through on commitments made many sessions earlier, and adapt their behaviour to each user.
By Weidong Guo, Dakai Wang, Zixuan Wang, Hui Liu, Yu Xu
arXiv:2608. 03463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory is essential for LLM-based agents to sustain interactions and reliably leverage distant history.
By Yuxin Liao, Le Wu, Min Hou, Hao Liu, Han Wu, Zishu Wang
arXiv:2604. 20920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention can reduce the cost of long-context inference, but most variants introduce new architectural components.
By Yuzhen Mao, Michael Y. Li, Emily B. Fox
arXiv:2606. 29914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent memory systems are increasingly evaluated against RAG and full-context baselines, but reported gains often mix changes in the memory method with changes in the language model, embedding model, or retrieval pipeline, making it unclear what is actually being measured.
By Kuan Wang
Mnemon is a memory agent that stores conversations as raw, dated records and uses a fast System 1 decision model (Jev) to quickly judge the relevance of records, while a slow System 2 LLM plans searches and composes answers. The agent consolidates records into topic timelines and value histories in the background, enabling efficient retrieval without rewriting conversations into structured formats. Experiments show Mnemon achieving high scores on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S with low context length and cost, and Jev outperforming LLMs in evidence separation and speed.
By Guangren Wang
The paper introduces SCALE-QA, a new QA benchmark that tests conversational memory in flat, unsegmented multi‑topic threads by requiring agents to infer which earlier episode supports a later task decision. The dataset contains 3,000 audited questions across ten domains, uses deterministic four‑way multiple‑choice grading, and includes a runtime builder for reproducibility. The authors also propose Temporal‑Semantic Interleaved Memory Reconstruction (TSIM), a hierarchical memory stack that segments turns into coherent episodes and indexes them with deterministic summaries and cluster‑routing views, achieving significant accuracy gains over strong RAG baselines and long‑context LLMs.
By Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang, Pengtao Xie
The paper introduces MERIT, a benchmark that evaluates the marginal benefit of long‑term memory for tool‑using large language model agents while explicitly accounting for cost. MERIT provides episodic tool‑use tasks across three domains, verifies dependence on earlier‑episode facts, and measures memory operations in tokens and dollars. Experiments on GPT‑4.1‑mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 5 show that memory can significantly improve task success, but its utility varies widely across models and memory implementations, and full replay is rarely cost‑effective.
By Shweta Mishra, Shashank Mishra
arXiv:2609.01111v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Clinical LLM assistants must reason over multi-visit patient trajectories, yet whether the compact history representations used to scale them---retriev...
By Huimin Wang, Zhengyi Zhao, Yutian Zhao
The paper introduces the Weighted Memory Tree (WMT), a hierarchical memory system for large language model agents that organizes execution histories into tasks, subtasks, and actions while assigning each memory a dynamic retention score. Event-based updates and selection-based decay allow WMT to preserve useful information, fold completed trajectories, suppress low-utility content, and retain access to folded context. Experiments on GAIA-Text with Qwen3-8B, Gemma 4 E4B, and Llama-3.1-8B show that WMT improves accuracy by an average of 9.97 percentage points and reduces prompt-token usage by 32.8%, while also limiting the persistence of unreliable information.
By Quang Dao, Purvi Kathalkar, Kenneth Eaton
arXiv:2601. 00821v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A growing class of conversational-memory systems compresses dialogue history into structured artifacts -- extracted facts, decisions, or events -- on the premise that distilled structure retrieves better than raw text.
By Tao An