arXiv Computation and Language By Xinying Qian, Ying Zhang, Yu Zhao, Xubo Liu, Baohang Zhou, Jeff Z. Pan

ETAMem: Decoupling and Aligning Heterogeneous Memory for Long-Term Conversational Agents

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

ETAMem is a multi‑view memory framework designed to improve long‑term conversational agents by decoupling heterogeneous information and aligning memory representations with distinct characteristics. It parses conversational data into atomic units, identifies affective content, and organizes these units into three complementary hierarchical views—Event, Affect, and Time—using adaptively calibrated thresholds. Retrieval is performed via entropy‑based allocation of query budgets across views, enabling hierarchical search within each view. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S show that ETAMem surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines with relative accuracy gains of 12.46% and 7.96%, while remaining token‑efficient, and analyses confirm the complementary benefits of the different memory views.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Event-Centric Memory with Query-Aware Graph Augmentation for Long-Term Conversational Agents

The paper introduces QGMem, a memory framework for conversational agents that organizes dialogue history into event-indexed atomic units and consolidates related units into dynamic memory traces. When a query is posed, QGMem retrieves complementary candidate memories, reranks them to form a compact working memory, and represents this working memory as a local graph to expose relational dependencies. Experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in retrieval, multi‑hop evidence composition, conflict resolution, and ultra‑long dialogue reasoning while keeping context size and inference cost moderate.

By Yichen Liu, Chunfeng Yuan, Haowei Liu, Wenjuan Li, Zefeng Lin, Bing Li, Xu Chen, Weiming Hu
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 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