The paper surveys memory‑centric compression techniques for large language models, framing long‑context handling as a memory‑management problem. It distinguishes compute‑active memory from compute‑inactive memory, and models operations such as writing, offloading, recall, and forgetting as state transitions within an information lifecycle. The authors propose a unified cost model and argue that future research should focus on dynamic, lifecycle‑aware memory management rather than static compression.
By Chaogui Gou
arXiv:2608.00311v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Long-context inference with large language models (LLMs) is costly: self-attention during prefill scales quadratically with sequence length, and th...
By Maryam Haghifam, Jason Cong, Yizhou Sun
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:2606. 28876v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study memory-managed long-context attention: explicit bounded memory with a learned query-independent writer, lifecycle control, query-aware reading, calibrated sparse fallback, and frozen-LLM generation from raw evidence.
By Junyi Zou, Avrova Donz
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: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
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:2610.15715v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Linear attention promises the efficiency needed for long-context language modelling, yet its fixed-size recurrent state must simultaneously support ong...
By Li Nanbo, Firas Laakom, Yilan Zhang, Piotr Pi\k{e}kos, Yimeng Chen, Liangyu Wang, Yifan Xu, Mateusz Ostaszewski, Dandan Guo, Wenyi Wang, Yanning Dai, Yuhui Wang, J\"{u}rgen Schmidhuber
arXiv:2606. 28876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language models often conflate two different goals: compressing history into an efficient state, and maintaining reliable long-term memory.
By Junyi Zou, Avrova Donz
MemCut introduces a benchmark to test user-requested forgetting in large language model agents, featuring 456 hand-designed secrets embedded in long-horizon conversations with fully annotated evidence trails. The benchmark defines two recovery metrics—native and residual—to assess how well secrets can be retrieved after deletion. Experiments across five memory designs and four LLMs show that deletion reduces native recovery more than residual recovery, highlighting candidate coverage as a key bottleneck.
By Cheng Zhang, Xuanning Cao, Zhicheng Zheng, Hui Xiong
arXiv:2610.15642v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Under a limited context budget, a long-term agent must recall not merely memories that are individually relevant, but evidence that is collectively suf...
By Qi Feng, Jicong Fan
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.
By Maksim Sheverev, David Finkelstein, Sergey Nikolenko