arXiv:2607. 00017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term conversational agents are expected to remember past interactions, but memory is useful only when the right evidence is recalled for the right user.
By ZhiShu Jiang, Haibo Liu, Xin Shen, Guanqiang QI, Chenxi Miao, Weikang Li, Liwei Qian, Xin Pei, Jizhou Huang
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
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
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
DiaLong is a new long‑context dialogue benchmark that tests transformer‑based Large Language Models’ ability to retain and recall memories. The dataset contains 100 human‑created conversations, expanded with LLMs to exceed lengths of existing datasets, and includes a fact‑recall task where models must classify 40 candidate facts as true or false. Experiments show current LLMs and memory‑enhancement methods still struggle, indicating a need for improved memory performance in extended conversations.
By Owen Bianchi, Samer Aslan, Ryunosuke Saito
The paper introduces T‑Mem, a memory framework that uses temporal structure to manage long‑horizon multi‑party conversations. It employs Temporal Evidence Discovery to find locally concentrated evidence, Temporal Memory Structuring to model state transitions and compress low‑information spans, and Evidence Forest Linearization to serialize the evidence for answer generation. Experiments on two benchmarks show that T‑Mem outperforms existing memory frameworks across various settings.
By Junyou Guo, Chongyang Tao, Yan He, Yong Wang, Shuai Ma