arXiv Computation and Language

Chain on Demand: Deferred Evidence Organization for Long-Term Conversational Memory

The paper introduces Chain on Demand (CoD), a query‑time evidence organization framework that builds a temporary evidence chain from an unchanged turn‑level memory. CoD allocates a fixed anchor budget based on query relevance, lexical diversity, and new query terms, then restores each anchor’s same‑session neighborhood deterministically. In evaluations on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S, CoD achieves high accuracy, demonstrating that long‑term conversational memory can remain unchanged while deferring evidence organization until the query is known.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

APDMem: Agent-Controlled Progressive Disclosure for Query-Adaptive Long-Term Memory

APDMem is a hierarchical long‑term memory system for personalized LLM assistants that uses progressive disclosure to retrieve conversation history. It organizes memory into four layers—thematic summaries, personalized key facts, turn‑level evidence notes, and raw messages—and a controller reads from the top layer, drilling down only when necessary. This approach balances cost and fidelity, allowing simple queries to finish early while deeper inspection is triggered for complex or exact‑evidence requests, and a note synthesizer structures retrieved evidence before answer generation. Experiments on LongMemEval show APDMem performs strongly while accessing only 8% of the total conversations.

By Chin-Lun Fu, Anagha Kulkarni, Hong Ni, Behrouz Madahian
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

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

JustMem is a new memory system for long‑term conversational AI that stores conversation history as compact atomic memories and adapts its access strategy to each query. It introduces two dimensions of memory access—discovery breadth and reading fidelity—implemented through LOOKUP for local evidence, COMPOSE for distributed evidence, and REPLAY for fidelity‑sensitive evidence. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S show that JustMem outperforms competing memory systems in accuracy and recall while using fewer generative‑model tokens for memory construction and inference.

By Guanhua Chen, Yanting Wang, Wenjing Zhi, Lei Sha
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Where to Look and What to Use: Retrieve-Localize-Generate for Long-Term Conversational Memory Question Answering

arXiv:2609.07093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions by accessing external knowledge and has been widely a...

By Yifan Wang, Xinkui Lin, Yongxiu Xu, Shen Gao, Ruochen Yang, Kun Huang, Yubin Wang, Jie Wu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu, Shuo Shang
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 AI
Oct 19

From Memory Hits to Answerable Evidence: Query-Conditioned Memory Compilation for Long-Term Agent Memory

The paper introduces MemCompile, a query‑conditioned evidence compilation framework designed to improve long‑term conversational memory. It uses an Address Plane to locate relevant support via compact descriptors and capacity‑aware cells, then normalizes retrieval hits into stable SourcePacket identities. An Evidence Plane allocates a bounded evidence budget across packets, admits limited additional support, and produces answer‑ready context, achieving 80.52% Judge Accuracy on LoCoMo and improving the quality‑cost Pareto frontier.

By Shangze Li, Yanyu Yao, Derong Xu, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Test-Time Memory Construction

The paper introduces T$^2$Mem, a Test-Time Memory construction framework that defers memory building to inference, allowing large language models to adaptively retrieve and organize episode-level metadata and raw interactions during reasoning. By extracting lightweight metadata offline and progressively constructing query-specific memory at test time, T$^2$Mem reduces overhead and improves performance on long-horizon tasks. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval demonstrate consistent gains over strong baselines across various backbone LLMs.

By Zijun Wang, Yifan Ji, Haidong Xin, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Zulong Chen, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 4

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

The paper introduces LOCOMO-CONV, a conversational memory benchmark that expands on the existing LoCoMo dataset with four query styles—dialog, implicit, counterfactual, and composed—designed to evaluate memory systems in realistic conversational settings. Experiments across five memory systems reveal that conversational framing uncovers significant retrieval gaps missed by traditional QA benchmarks, particularly for implicit and composed queries, and that strong retrieval does not necessarily translate into higher response quality. The study also highlights silent grounding in implicit queries, where memory enhances contextual grounding without explicitly presenting the gold fact, suggesting a need for reasoning-based memory elaboration.

By Wen-Yu Chang, Yun-Nung Chen