arXiv Computation and Language

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

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 14

CueMem: Cue-Guided Context Reconstruction for Long-Term Conversational Memory

CueMem is a cue‑guided framework for long‑term conversational memory that reconstructs query‑relevant dialogue context from compressed memory records. Instead of treating memory units as self‑contained evidence, it extracts fine‑grained cues linked to their source turns and, at query time, expands from these cues over a turn graph to rebuild a compact evidence context. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that CueMem outperforms baseline memory methods, reduces input tokens and latency, and improves long‑term conversational question answering.

By Changjian Wang, Rongzhen Li, Weili Guan, Shuming Shi, Quan Lu, Ning Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

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
Aug 27

Reconstructing the Right Episode: Evaluating Interleaved Conversational Memory Beyond Long Context

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
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

ReContext: Recursive Evidence Replay as LLM Harness for Long-Context Reasoning

Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications. Although recent LLMs support increasingly long context windows, they often fail to use relevant evidence that is already present in the input, revealing a gap between context access and effective context utilization.