arXiv AI

Beyond Memory Leaderboards: Evaluating Scientific Memory as Budgeted Context Restoration

arXiv:2607. 16848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term memory is becoming a core component of LLM agents, but most memory benchmarks evaluate conversations or compact summaries, while research agents need to restore evidence from full scientific papers.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

When Does Memory Help? A Cost-Aware Evaluation of Long-Term Memory in Tool-Using LLM Agents

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Q2D-Web: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Retrieval in Agentic RAG Systems

Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

UTILMEM: Benchmarking Evidence Utilization in Long-Term Conversational Memory

UTILMEM is a new diagnostic benchmark that tests how conversational agents use long‑term memory, focusing on reasoning over dense histories, spotting implicitly relevant memories, synthesizing distributed evidence, and resisting interference from similar distractors. It contains 1,717 instances across five domains and evaluates a range of retrieval‑based and memory‑augmented systems. The study shows that strong performance on traditional factual recall does not guarantee effective memory utilization, highlighting a gap between retrieving information and integrating it into coherent, task‑oriented outputs.

By Peijun Qing, Fobo Shi, Soroush Vosoughi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Agent Zero Memory: Provenance-Aware Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents

Agent Zero Memory is a provenance‑aware long‑term memory system for large language model agents that distills user interactions into three parallel memory structures: an episodic timeline, an associative entity‑event knowledge graph, and a semantic, citation‑locked hierarchical documentary memory. Retrieval is performed via an intent gate, source router, and concurrent searches across the three systems, producing integrated, cited answers that exclude fabrication and require evidence the reader has opened. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LongMemEval (95.60%) and LoCoMo (93.60%) while offering a favorable accuracy‑cost‑latency trade‑off across multiple backbone LLMs.

By Ming Wu, Pengyuan Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

rEDMRec: Distilling Large Language Model Reasoning into an Editable Experience Memory for Recommendation

The paper introduces rEDMRec, a method that compresses a large language model’s reasoning about user preferences and item comparisons into a compact, editable memory. This memory, organized into four channels—long‑term preference, short‑term context, item perception, and counterfactual hard‑negative comparisons—can be updated by an LLM controller and queried by a lightweight student LLM for ranking, eliminating the need to re‑run the expensive teacher model for each request. Experiments on ML‑1M, Amazon Beauty, and Steam datasets show that rEDMRec consistently outperforms zero‑shot, few‑shot, RAG, and GraphRAG baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% improvement in HR@1 on ML‑1M.

By Minh Hoang Nguyen, Tung Le, Huy Tien Nguyen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 11

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Entity-Memory Graph Retrieval Improves Evidence Coverage in Long-Conversation Question Answering

Entity-Memory graph retrieval preserves dialogue turns as verbatim memory nodes, links repeated mentions via shared entities, and connects adjacent memories with chronological edges. During retrieval, the system gates through entities, fuses semantics, and performs one‑hop chronological recovery before dense backfill, allowing it to keep neighboring memories that dense cosine ranking might miss. On 1,986 questions from ten LoCoMo conversations, this graph retrieval method increases official evidence recall at top‑k 25 from 79.7468 % to 84.4842 %, with the advantage extending from top‑k 5 to 50, though it does not improve overall final‑answer F1.

By Shumao Sun