arXiv AI

CAVE-Mem: Boundary-Aware Experience Validation for Memory Search

CAVE-Mem is a training‑free framework that enhances memory search for long‑term memory agents by treating experience as a typed intervention operator with conditions on applicability, boundary, and utility. It first retrieves a base answer and then only applies an intervention if the operator matches the current memory substrate, answer contract, evidence boundary, and cross‑fitted utility; otherwise it abstains. Experiments on conversational memory, multi‑hop QA, and long‑document reasoning demonstrate consistent improvements over relevance‑only experience reuse.

arXiv AI
Sep 11

What Should an Agent Forget? Separating What Is Stored from What Is Used

The paper introduces RD-Forget, a training‑free framework that separates what a persistent language agent stores from what it uses at answer time. It keeps a source archive of all observations while a query‑conditioned memory view filters evidence relevant to the current question, using a frozen language‑model curator to group facts into semantic slots and preserve multi‑hop relations. The approach employs rate‑distortion principles to stay within a memory budget and demonstrates improvements across conversational memory, knowledge updating, fact consolidation, long‑context reasoning, and personalization tasks.

By Yuhang Li, Yuchen Li
arXiv AI
Jul 8

From Passive Retrieval to Active Memory Navigation: Learning to Use Memory as a Structured Action Space

arXiv:2607. 05794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term user memory is essential for personalized conversational agents, yet many memory systems still expose memory through passive retrieval interfaces, making the model a consumer of pre-selected evidence.

By Yue Xu, Yutao Sun, Yihao Liu, Mengyu Zhou, Jiayi Qiao, Lu Ma, Kai Tang, Wenjie Wang, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
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 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
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
Sep 10

EdgeMem: LLM-Free Agent Memory Construction and Retrieval via Evidence-Preserving Multi-Anchor Hypergraph

EdgeMem is a new agent-memory method that preserves original interaction turns and organizes them using complementary content, temporal, and episodic cues via a multi‑anchor hypergraph. It performs lightweight local processing, returning source evidence directly and reserving LLM use only for final answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S demonstrate strong retrieval and memory‑grounded question answering, with EdgeMem achieving the highest strict‑judge score among seven systems on LoCoMo while requiring no generative‑LLM calls for construction and retrieval.

By Zeyang Cui, Jiannong Cao, Zhiyuan Wen, Bo Yuan, Junlan Feng, Shengyuan Chen