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