arXiv Computation and Language By Peijun Qing, Fobo Shi, Soroush Vosoughi

UTILMEM: Benchmarking Evidence Utilization in Long-Term Conversational Memory

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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.

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