Daily Papers

In order for large language models to achieve true conversational continuity and benefit from experiential learning, they need memory. While research has focused on the development of complex memory systems, it remains unclear which types of memory are most effective for long-context conversational tasks. We present a systematic evaluation of memory-augmented methods using LoCoMo, a benchmark of synthetic long-context dialogues annotated for question-answering tasks that require diverse reasoning strategies. We analyse full-context prompting, semantic memory through retrieval-augmented generation and agentic memory, episodic memory through in-context learning, and procedural memory through prompt optimization. Our findings show that memory-augmented approaches reduce token usage by over 90% while maintaining competitive accuracy. Memory architecture complexity should scale with model capability, with small foundation models benefitting most from RAG, and strong instruction-tuned reasoning model gaining from episodic learning through reflections and more complex agentic semantic memory. In particular, episodic memory can help LLMs recognise the limits of their own knowledge.

Most open-domain dialogue systems suffer from forgetting important information, especially in a long-term conversation. Existing works usually train the specific retriever or summarizer to obtain key information from the past, which is time-consuming and highly depends on the quality of labeled data. To alleviate this problem, we propose to recursively generate summaries/ memory using large language models (LLMs) to enhance long-term memory ability. Specifically, our method first stimulates LLMs to memorize small dialogue contexts and then recursively produce new memory using previous memory and following contexts. Finally, the LLM can easily generate a highly consistent response with the help of the latest memory. We evaluate our method using ChatGPT and text-davinci-003, and the experiments on the widely-used public dataset show that our method can generate more consistent responses in a long-context conversation. Notably, our method is a potential solution to enable the LLM to model the extremely long context. Code and scripts will be released later.

Language agents spend substantial inference time solving individual tasks, yet the experience acquired in one episode is often underutilized in future episodes. Continual learning expects an agent to accumulate reusable experience across a stream of tasks, improve over time, and avoid interference from irrelevant experiences. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks struggle to evaluate continual learning in language agents rigorously. Most efforts focus on retrieval and reasoning over long-context conversations or documents, while recent lifelong-adaptation benchmarks often rely on naive task streams with limited analysis of cross-task relationships, making it difficult to understand what an agent learns and reuses over time. This paper presents an evaluation framework AgentCL for continual learning in agents, centered on controlled task streams and metrics for transfer gains. AgentCL constructs compositional streams where earlier sub-solutions, evidence, or workflows are intentionally reusable in later tasks, and contrasts them with naive streams where such reusability is not guaranteed. We use the benchmark to evaluate non-parametric memory designs for continual learning. To diagnose how memory design choices affect continual learning, we develop MemProbe, a probing method that stores interactions, insights, and skills, while filtering unreliable experiences during consolidation. Empirical analysis across coding, deep research, and language understanding/reasoning tasks shows that naive streams offer limited ability to distinguish memory designs, whereas controlled streams more clearly distinguish their plasticity. Meanwhile, naive and held-out settings often yield limited gains and can expose memory-induced degradation. These results highlight the need for stronger memory designs that balance plasticity and stable reuse.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as chatbots, yet their ability to personalize responses to user preferences remains limited. We introduce PrefEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to infer, memorize and adhere to user preferences in a long-context conversational setting. PrefEval comprises 3,000 manually curated user preference and query pairs spanning 20 topics. PrefEval contains user personalization or preference information in both explicit and implicit forms, and evaluates LLM performance using a generation and a classification task. With PrefEval, we evaluated the aforementioned preference following capabilities of 10 open-source and proprietary LLMs in multi-session conversations with varying context lengths up to 100k tokens. We benchmark with various prompting, iterative feedback, and retrieval-augmented generation methods. Our benchmarking effort reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs face significant challenges in proactively following users' preferences during conversations. In particular, in zero-shot settings, preference following accuracy falls below 10% at merely 10 turns (~3k tokens) across most evaluated models. Even with advanced prompting and retrieval methods, preference following still deteriorates in long-context conversations. Furthermore, we show that fine-tuning on PrefEval significantly improves performance. We believe PrefEval serves as a valuable resource for measuring, understanding, and enhancing LLMs' preference following abilities, paving the way for personalized conversational agents. Our code and dataset are available at https://prefeval.github.io/.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining coherence in extended conversations spanning hundreds of turns, despite performing well within their context windows. This paper introduces HEMA (Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture), a dual-memory system inspired by human cognitive processes. HEMA combines Compact Memory - a continuously updated one-sentence summary preserving global narrative coherence, and Vector Memory - an episodic store of chunk embeddings queried via cosine similarity. When integrated with a 6B-parameter transformer, HEMA maintains coherent dialogues beyond 300 turns while keeping prompt length under 3,500 tokens. Experimental results show substantial improvements: factual recall accuracy increases from 41% to 87%, and human-rated coherence improves from 2.7 to 4.3 on a 5-point scale. With 10K indexed chunks, Vector Memory achieves P@5 >= 0.80 and R@50 >= 0.74, doubling the area under the precision-recall curve compared to summarization-only approaches. Ablation studies reveal two key insights: semantic forgetting through age-weighted pruning reduces retrieval latency by 34% with minimal recall loss, and a two-level summary hierarchy prevents cascade errors in ultra-long conversations exceeding 1,000 turns. HEMA demonstrates that combining verbatim recall with semantic continuity provides a practical solution for privacy-aware conversational AI capable of month-long dialogues without model retraining.

Despite improvements by length extrapolation, efficient attention and memory modules, handling infinitely long documents with linear complexity without performance degradation during extrapolation remains the ultimate challenge in long-text processing. We directly optimize for long-text tasks in an end-to-end fashion and introduce a novel agent workflow, MemAgent, which reads text in segments and updates the memory using an overwrite strategy. We extend the DAPO algorithm to facilitate training via independent-context multi-conversation generation. MemAgent has demonstrated superb long-context capabilities, being able to extrapolate from an 8K context trained on 32K text to a 3.5M QA task with performance loss < 5% and achieves 95%+ in 512K RULER test.

Large language models (LLMs) make significant progress in Emotional Intelligence (EI) and long-context understanding. However, existing benchmarks tend to overlook certain aspects of EI in long-context scenarios, especially under realistic, practical settings where interactions are lengthy, diverse, and often noisy. To move towards such realistic settings, we present LongEmotion, a benchmark specifically designed for long-context EI tasks. It covers a diverse set of tasks, including Emotion Classification, Emotion Detection, Emotion QA, Emotion Conversation, Emotion Summary, and Emotion Expression. On average, the input length for these tasks reaches 8,777 tokens, with long-form generation required for Emotion Expression. To enhance performance under realistic constraints, we incorporate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Collaborative Emotional Modeling (CoEM), and compare them with standard prompt-based methods. Unlike conventional approaches, our RAG method leverages both the conversation context and the large language model itself as retrieval sources, avoiding reliance on external knowledge bases. The CoEM method further improves performance by decomposing the task into five stages, integrating both retrieval augmentation and limited knowledge injection. Experimental results show that both RAG and CoEM consistently enhance EI-related performance across most long-context tasks, advancing LLMs toward more practical and real-world EI applications. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative case study experiment on the GPT series to demonstrate the differences among various models in terms of EI. Code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/LongEmotion/LongEmotion, and the project page can be found at https://longemotion.github.io/.

Large speech generation models are evolving from single-speaker, short sentence synthesis to multi-speaker, long conversation geneartion. Current long-form speech generation models are predominately constrained to dyadic, turn-based interactions. To address this, we introduce JoyVoice, a novel anthropomorphic foundation model designed for flexible, boundary-free synthesis of up to eight speakers. Unlike conventional cascaded systems, JoyVoice employs a unified E2E-Transformer-DiT architecture that utilizes autoregressive hidden representations directly for diffusion inputs, enabling holistic end-to-end optimization. We further propose a MM-Tokenizer operating at a low bitrate of 12.5 Hz, which integrates multitask semantic and MMSE losses to effectively model both semantic and acoustic information. Additionally, the model incorporates robust text front-end processing via large-scale data perturbation. Experiments show that JoyVoice achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual generation (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean) and zero-shot voice cloning. JoyVoice achieves top-tier results on both the Seed-TTS-Eval Benchmark and multi-speaker long-form conversational voice cloning tasks, demonstrating superior audio quality and generalization. It achieves significant improvements in prosodic continuity for long-form speech, rhythm richness in multi-speaker conversations, paralinguistic naturalness, besides superior intelligibility. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://jea-speech.github.io/JoyVoice

Long-context audio reasoning is underserved in both training data and evaluation. Existing benchmarks target short-context tasks, and the open-ended generation tasks most relevant to long-context reasoning pose well-known challenges for automatic evaluation. We propose a synthetic data generation pipeline designed to serve both as a training resource and as a controlled evaluation environment, and instantiate it for first-visit doctor-patient conversations with SOAP note generation as the task. The pipeline has three stages, persona-driven dialogue generation, multi-speaker audio synthesis with overlap/pause modeling, room acoustics, and sound events, and LLM-based reference SOAP note production, built entirely on open-weight models. We release 8,800 synthetic conversations with 1.3k hours of corresponding audio and reference notes. Evaluating current open-weight systems, we find that cascaded approaches still substantially outperform end-to-end models.

Long-term memory has become a foundational capability for LLM-based agents that accompany users across extended, multi-session interactions. Existing benchmarks, however, evaluate such memory almost exclusively through downstream question answering, scoring only the correctness of a final answer. This black-box formulation conflates the heterogeneous causes of memory failure, such as missing the introduction of a relevant fact, binding an operation to the wrong target, or relying on stale values after a correction. As a result, it can credit correct answers despite their reliance on inconsistent or unsafe memory states. In this paper, we argue that, in dynamic long-horizon interactions, memory is not a static collection of facts but a lifecycle of explicit operations, including remembering, forgetting, updating, reflecting, and their compositions. We introduce MemOps, a benchmark that reformulates conversational memory as a sequence of lifecycle operations and represents each memory event with a structured trace specifying its trigger, target, scope, state transition, and supporting evidence. A controllable generation pipeline embeds these operations into long, task-oriented conversations and produces gold operation traces together with six categories of operation-level probes, evaluated under both adjacent-evidence and long-context settings. Across long-context, retrieval-based, parametric and managed-memory systems, MemOps disentangles failure modes that final-answer accuracy alone conceals, revealing that current systems remain far from uniformly reliable. For instance, session-level retrieval outperforms turn-level retrieval, and long-context models remain notably weak at reconstructing ordered memory-state trajectories. These results move long-term memory evaluation from final-answer scoring toward interpretable, operation-level diagnosis.

Existing works on long-term open-domain dialogues focus on evaluating model responses within contexts spanning no more than five chat sessions. Despite advancements in long-context large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques, their efficacy in very long-term dialogues remains unexplored. To address this research gap, we introduce a machine-human pipeline to generate high-quality, very long-term dialogues by leveraging LLM-based agent architectures and grounding their dialogues on personas and temporal event graphs. Moreover, we equip each agent with the capability of sharing and reacting to images. The generated conversations are verified and edited by human annotators for long-range consistency and grounding to the event graphs. Using this pipeline, we collect LoCoMo, a dataset of very long-term conversations, each encompassing 300 turns and 9K tokens on avg., over up to 35 sessions. Based on LoCoMo, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to measure long-term memory in models, encompassing question answering, event summarization, and multi-modal dialogue generation tasks. Our experimental results indicate that LLMs exhibit challenges in understanding lengthy conversations and comprehending long-range temporal and causal dynamics within dialogues. Employing strategies like long-context LLMs or RAG can offer improvements but these models still substantially lag behind human performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential as conversational agents. Yet, their effectiveness remains limited by deficiencies in robust long-term memory, particularly in complex, long-term web-based services such as online emotional support. However, existing long-term dialogue benchmarks primarily focus on static and explicit fact retrieval, failing to evaluate agents in critical scenarios where user information is dispersed, implicit, and continuously evolving. To address this gap, we introduce ES-MemEval, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates five core memory capabilities: information extraction, temporal reasoning, conflict detection, abstention, and user modeling, in long-term emotional support settings, covering question answering, summarization, and dialogue generation tasks. To support the benchmark, we also propose EvoEmo, a multi-session dataset for personalized long-term emotional support that captures fragmented, implicit user disclosures and evolving user states. Extensive experiments on open-source long-context, commercial, and retrieval-augmented (RAG) LLMs show that explicit long-term memory is essential for reducing hallucinations and enabling effective personalization. At the same time, RAG improves factual consistency but struggles with temporal dynamics and evolving user states. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of current paradigms and motivate more robust integration of memory and retrieval for long-term personalized dialogue systems.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to process and reason over long textual inputs is critical for a wide range of real-world applications. However, progress in this area is significantly constrained by the absence of high-quality, diverse, and verifiable long-context datasets suitable for both training and evaluation. This work introduces a modular, extensible framework for synthetic long-context data generation via prompt-based interaction with LLMs. The framework supports multiple training and alignment objectives, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). It encompasses four core generation paradigms: multi-turn conversational dialogues, document-grounded input-output pairs, verifiable instruction-response tasks, and long-context reasoning examples. Through templated prompting, a model-agnostic architecture, and metadata-enriched outputs, the proposed approach facilitates scalable, controllable, and purpose-aligned dataset creation for advancing long-context capabilities in LLMs.

LLMs and RAG systems are now capable of handling millions of input tokens or more. However, evaluating the output quality of such systems on long-context tasks remains challenging, as tasks like Needle-in-a-Haystack lack complexity. In this work, we argue that summarization can play a central role in such evaluation. We design a procedure to synthesize Haystacks of documents, ensuring that specific insights repeat across documents. The "Summary of a Haystack" (SummHay) task then requires a system to process the Haystack and generate, given a query, a summary that identifies the relevant insights and precisely cites the source documents. Since we have precise knowledge of what insights should appear in a haystack summary and what documents should be cited, we implement a highly reproducible automatic evaluation that can score summaries on two aspects - Coverage and Citation. We generate Haystacks in two domains (conversation, news), and perform a large-scale evaluation of 10 LLMs and corresponding 50 RAG systems. Our findings indicate that SummHay is an open challenge for current systems, as even systems provided with an Oracle signal of document relevance lag our estimate of human performance (56\%) by 10+ points on a Joint Score. Without a retriever, long-context LLMs like GPT-4o and Claude 3 Opus score below 20% on SummHay. We show SummHay can also be used to study enterprise RAG systems and position bias in long-context models. We hope future systems can equal and surpass human performance on SummHay.

Recently, there has been growing interest in extending the context length of instruction-following models in order to effectively process single-turn long input (e.g. summarizing a paper) and conversations with more extensive histories. While proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude have demonstrated considerable advancements in handling tens of thousands of tokens of context, open-sourced models are still in the early stages of experimentation. It also remains unclear whether developing these long context models can offer substantial gains on practical downstream tasks over retrieval-based methods or models simply trained on chunked contexts. To address this challenge, we propose to institute standardized evaluation for long context language models. Concretely, we develop L-Eval which contains 411 long documents and over 2,000 query-response pairs manually annotated and checked by the authors encompassing areas such as law, finance, school lectures, lengthy conversations, news, long-form novels, and meetings. L-Eval also adopts diverse evaluation methods and instruction styles, enabling a more reliable assessment of Long Context Language Models (LCLMs). Our findings indicate that while open-source models typically lag behind their commercial counterparts, they still exhibit impressive performance. LLaMA2 achieves the best results (win 45\% vs turbo-16k) on open-ended tasks with only 4k context length and ChatGLM2 achieves the best results on closed-ended tasks with 8k input tokens. We release our new evaluation suite, code, and all generation results including predictions from all open-sourced LCLMs, GPT4-32k, Cluade-100k at {https://github.com/OpenLMLab/LEval}.

Handling long-context inputs is crucial for large language models (LLMs) in tasks such as extended conversations, document summarization, and many-shot in-context learning. While recent approaches have extended the context windows of LLMs and employed perplexity (PPL) as a standard evaluation metric, PPL has proven unreliable for assessing long-context capabilities. The underlying cause of this limitation has remained unclear. In this work, we provide a comprehensive explanation for this issue. We find that PPL overlooks key tokens, which are essential for long-context understanding, by averaging across all tokens and thereby obscuring the true performance of models in long-context scenarios. To address this, we propose LongPPL, a novel metric that focuses on key tokens by employing a long-short context contrastive method to identify them. Our experiments demonstrate that LongPPL strongly correlates with performance on various long-context benchmarks (e.g., Pearson correlation of -0.96), significantly outperforming traditional PPL in predictive accuracy. Additionally, we introduce LongCE (Long-context Cross-Entropy) loss, a re-weighting strategy for fine-tuning that prioritizes key tokens, leading to consistent improvements across diverse benchmarks. In summary, these contributions offer deeper insights into the limitations of PPL and present effective solutions for accurately evaluating and enhancing the long-context capabilities of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/LongPPL.

Hallucination, a phenomenon where multimodal large language models~(MLLMs) tend to generate textual responses that are plausible but unaligned with the image, has become one major hurdle in various MLLM-related applications. Several benchmarks have been created to gauge the hallucination levels of MLLMs, by either raising discriminative questions about the existence of objects or introducing LLM evaluators to score the generated text from MLLMs. However, the discriminative data largely involve simple questions that are not aligned with real-world text, while the generative data involve LLM evaluators that are computationally intensive and unstable due to their inherent randomness. We propose LongHalQA, an LLM-free hallucination benchmark that comprises 6K long and complex hallucination text. LongHalQA is featured by GPT4V-generated hallucinatory data that are well aligned with real-world scenarios, including object/image descriptions and multi-round conversations with 14/130 words and 189 words, respectively, on average. It introduces two new tasks, hallucination discrimination and hallucination completion, unifying both discriminative and generative evaluations in a single multiple-choice-question form and leading to more reliable and efficient evaluations without the need for LLM evaluators. Further, we propose an advanced pipeline that greatly facilitates the construction of future hallucination benchmarks with long and complex questions and descriptions. Extensive experiments over multiple recent MLLMs reveal various new challenges when they are handling hallucinations with long and complex textual data. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/hanqiu-hq/LongHalQA.

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

As model context lengths continue to grow, concerns about whether models effectively use the full context length have persisted. While several carefully designed long-context evaluations have recently been released, these evaluations tend to rely on retrieval from one or more sections of the context, which allows nearly all of the context tokens to be disregarded as noise. This represents only one type of task that might be performed with long context. We introduce Oolong, a benchmark of long-context reasoning tasks that require analyzing individual chunks of text on an atomic level, and then aggregating these analyses to answer distributional questions. Oolong is separated into two task sets: Oolong-synth, a set of naturalistic synthetic tasks, where we can easily ablate components of the reasoning problem; and Oolong-real, a downstream setting which requires reasoning over real-world conversational data. Oolong requires models to reason over large quantities of examples, to perform both classification and counting in-context, and to reason over temporal and user relations. Even frontier models struggle on Oolong, with GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4, and Gemini-2.5-Pro all achieving less than 50% accuracy on both splits at 128K. We release the data and evaluation harness for Oolong to enable further development of models that can reason over large quantities of text.

Large language models are often used to answer queries grounded in large text corpora (e.g. codebases, legal documents, or chat histories) by placing the entire corpus in the context window and leveraging in-context learning (ICL). Although current models support contexts of 100K-1M tokens, this setup is costly to serve because the memory consumption of the KV cache scales with input length. We explore an alternative: training a smaller KV cache offline on each corpus. At inference time, we load this trained KV cache, which we call a Cartridge, and decode a response. Critically, the cost of training a Cartridge can be amortized across all the queries referencing the same corpus. However, we find that the naive approach of training the Cartridge with next-token prediction on the corpus is not competitive with ICL. Instead, we propose self-study, a training recipe in which we generate synthetic conversations about the corpus and train the Cartridge with a context-distillation objective. We find that Cartridges trained with self-study replicate the functionality of ICL, while being significantly cheaper to serve. On challenging long-context benchmarks, Cartridges trained with self-study match ICL performance while using 38.6x less memory and enabling 26.4x higher throughput. Self-study also extends the model's effective context length (e.g. from 128k to 484k tokens on MTOB) and surprisingly, leads to Cartridges that can be composed at inference time without retraining.

Long-horizon interactions between users and LLM-based assistants necessitate effective memory management, yet current approaches face challenges in training and evaluation of memory. Existing memory benchmarks rely on static, off-policy data as context, limiting evaluation reliability and scalability. To address these gaps, we introduce AMemGym, an interactive environment enabling on-policy evaluation and optimization for memory-driven personalization. AMemGym employs structured data sampling to predefine user profiles, state-dependent questions, and state evolution trajectories, enabling cost-effective generation of high-quality, evaluation-aligned interactions. LLM-simulated users expose latent states through role-play while maintaining structured state consistency. Comprehensive metrics based on structured data guide both assessment and optimization of assistants. Extensive experiments reveal performance gaps in existing memory systems (e.g., RAG, long-context LLMs, and agentic memory) and corresponding reasons. AMemGym not only enables effective selection among competing approaches but also can potentially drive the self-evolution of memory management strategies. By bridging structured state evolution with free-form interactions, our framework provides a scalable, diagnostically rich environment for advancing memory capabilities in conversational agents.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into sophisticated autonomous agents capable of complex software development tasks, evaluating their real-world capabilities becomes critical. While existing benchmarks like LoCoBench~qiu2025locobench assess long-context code understanding, they focus on single-turn evaluation and cannot capture the multi-turn interactive nature, tool usage patterns, and adaptive reasoning required by real-world coding agents. We introduce LoCoBench-Agent, a comprehensive evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLM agents in realistic, long-context software engineering workflows. Our framework extends LoCoBench's 8,000 scenarios into interactive agent environments, enabling systematic evaluation of multi-turn conversations, tool usage efficiency, error recovery, and architectural consistency across extended development sessions. We also introduce an evaluation methodology with 9 metrics across comprehension and efficiency dimensions. Our framework provides agents with 8 specialized tools (file operations, search, code analysis) and evaluates them across context lengths ranging from 10K to 1M tokens, enabling precise assessment of long-context performance. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art models, we reveal several key findings: (1) agents exhibit remarkable long-context robustness; (2) comprehension-efficiency trade-off exists with negative correlation, where thorough exploration increases comprehension but reduces efficiency; and (3) conversation efficiency varies dramatically across models, with strategic tool usage patterns differentiating high-performing agents. As the first long-context LLM agent benchmark for software engineering, LoCoBench-Agent establishes a rigorous foundation for measuring agent capabilities, identifying performance gaps, and advancing autonomous software development at scale.

We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for conversational memory evaluation containing 75,336 question-answer pairs across diverse categories including user facts, assistant recall, abstention, preferences, temporal changes, and implicit connections. While existing benchmarks have advanced the field, our work addresses fundamental challenges in statistical power, data generation consistency, and evaluation flexibility that limit current memory evaluation frameworks. We examine the relationship between conversational memory and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). While these systems share fundamental architectural patterns--temporal reasoning, implicit extraction, knowledge updates, and graph representations--memory systems have a unique characteristic: they start from zero and grow progressively with each conversation. This characteristic enables naive approaches that would be impractical for traditional RAG. Consistent with recent findings on long context effectiveness, we observe that simple full-context approaches achieve 70-82% accuracy even on our most challenging multi-message evidence cases, while sophisticated RAG-based memory systems like Mem0 achieve only 30-45% when operating on conversation histories under 150 interactions. Our analysis reveals practical transition points: long context excels for the first 30 conversations, remains viable with manageable trade-offs up to 150 conversations, and typically requires hybrid or RAG approaches beyond that point as costs and latencies become prohibitive. These patterns indicate that the small-corpus advantage of conversational memory--where exhaustive search and complete reranking are feasible--deserves dedicated research attention rather than simply applying general RAG solutions to conversation histories.

Large language models (LLMs) achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they face challenges in managing long documents and extended conversations, due to significantly increased computational requirements, both in memory and inference time, and potential context truncation when the input exceeds the LLM's fixed context length. This paper proposes a method called Selective Context that enhances the inference efficiency of LLMs by identifying and pruning redundancy in the input context to make the input more compact. We test our approach using common data sources requiring long context processing: arXiv papers, news articles, and long conversations, on tasks of summarisation, question answering, and response generation. Experimental results show that Selective Context significantly reduces memory cost and decreases generation latency while maintaining comparable performance compared to that achieved when full context is used. Specifically, we achieve a 50\% reduction in context cost, resulting in a 36\% reduction in inference memory usage and a 32\% reduction in inference time, while observing only a minor drop of .023 in BERTscore and .038 in faithfulness on four downstream applications, indicating that our method strikes a good balance between efficiency and performance.

We present a memory system for AI agents that treats stored information as continuous fields governed by partial differential equations rather than discrete entries in a database. The approach draws from classical field theory: memories diffuse through semantic space, decay thermodynamically based on importance, and interact through field coupling in multi-agent scenarios. We evaluate the system on two established long-context benchmarks: LoCoMo (ACL 2024) with 300-turn conversations across 35 sessions, and LongMemEval (ICLR 2025) testing multi-session reasoning over 500+ turns. On LongMemEval, the field-theoretic approach achieves significant improvements: +116% F1 on multi-session reasoning (p<0.01, d= 3.06), +43.8% on temporal reasoning (p<0.001, d= 9.21), and +27.8% retrieval recall on knowledge updates (p<0.001, d= 5.00). Multi-agent experiments show near-perfect collective intelligence (>99.8%) through field coupling. Code is available at github.com/rotalabs/rotalabs-fieldmem.

Memory is essential for large vision-language models (LVLMs) to handle long, multimodal interactions, with two method directions providing this capability: long-context LVLMs and memory-augmented agents. However, no existing benchmark conducts a systematic comparison of the two on questions that genuinely require multimodal evidence. To close this gap, we introduce MEMLENS, a comprehensive benchmark for memory in multimodal multi-session conversations, comprising 789 questions across five memory abilities (information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal reasoning, knowledge update, and answer refusal) at four standard context lengths (32K-256K tokens) under a cross-modal token-counting scheme. An image-ablation study confirms that solving MEMLENS requires visual evidence: removing evidence images drops two frontier LVLMs below 2% accuracy on the 80.4% of questions whose evidence includes images. Evaluating 27 LVLMs and 7 memory-augmented agents, we find that long-context LVLMs achieve high short-context accuracy through direct visual grounding but degrade as conversations grow, whereas memory agents are length-stable but lose visual fidelity under storage-time compression. Multi-session reasoning caps most systems below 30%, and neither approach alone solves the task. These results motivate hybrid architectures that combine long-context attention with structured multimodal retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/xrenaf/MEMLENS.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue, their capabilities for effective management reasoning - including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription - remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) through a new LLM-based agentic system optimised for clinical management and dialogue, incorporating reasoning over the evolution of disease and multiple patient visit encounters, response to therapy, and professional competence in medication prescription. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini's long-context capabilities, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with relevant and up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialist physicians and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding of management plans in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. While AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE's strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

There has been a surge in the use of large language models (LLM) conversational agents to generate responses based on long-term history from multiple sessions. However, existing long-term open-domain dialogue datasets lack complex, real-world personalization and fail to capture implicit reasoning-where relevant information is embedded in subtle, syntactic, or semantically distant connections rather than explicit statements. In such cases, traditional retrieval methods fail to capture relevant context, and long-context modeling also becomes inefficient due to numerous complicated persona-related details. To address this gap, we introduce ImplexConv, a large-scale long-term dataset with 2,500 examples, each containing approximately 100 conversation sessions, designed to study implicit reasoning in personalized dialogues. Additionally, we propose TaciTree, a novel hierarchical tree framework that structures conversation history into multiple levels of summarization. Instead of brute-force searching all data, TaciTree enables an efficient, level-based retrieval process where models refine their search by progressively selecting relevant details. Our experiments demonstrate that TaciTree significantly improves the ability of LLMs to reason over long-term conversations with implicit contextual dependencies.

Generative large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved impressive performance gains, and their user base is growing rapidly. However, the security of LVLMs, in particular in a long-context multi-turn setting, is largely underexplored. In this paper, we consider the realistic scenario in which an attacker uploads a manipulated image to the web/social media. A benign user downloads this image and uses it as input to the LVLM. Our novel stealthy Visual Memory Injection (VMI) attack is designed such that on normal prompts the LVLM exhibits nominal behavior, but once the user gives a triggering prompt, the LVLM outputs a specific prescribed target message to manipulate the user, e.g. for adversarial marketing or political persuasion. Compared to previous work that focused on single-turn attacks, VMI is effective even after a long multi-turn conversation with the user. We demonstrate our attack on several recent open-weight LVLMs. This article thereby shows that large-scale manipulation of users is feasible with perturbed images in multi-turn conversation settings, calling for better robustness of LVLMs against these attacks. We release the source code at https://github.com/chs20/visual-memory-injection

Evaluating the abilities of large language models (LLMs) for tasks that require long-term memory and thus long-context reasoning, for example in conversational settings, is hampered by the existing benchmarks, which often lack narrative coherence, cover narrow domains, and only test simple recall-oriented tasks. This paper introduces a comprehensive solution to these challenges. First, we present a novel framework for automatically generating long (up to 10M tokens), coherent, and topically diverse conversations, accompanied by probing questions targeting a wide range of memory abilities. From this, we construct BEAM, a new benchmark comprising 100 conversations and 2,000 validated questions. Second, to enhance model performance, we propose LIGHT-a framework inspired by human cognition that equips LLMs with three complementary memory systems: a long-term episodic memory, a short-term working memory, and a scratchpad for accumulating salient facts. Our experiments on BEAM reveal that even LLMs with 1M token context windows (with and without retrieval-augmentation) struggle as dialogues lengthen. In contrast, LIGHT consistently improves performance across various models, achieving an average improvement of 3.5%-12.69% over the strongest baselines, depending on the backbone LLM. An ablation study further confirms the contribution of each memory component.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly receive information as streams of passages, conversations, and long-context workflows. While longer context windows expose more evidence, they do not ensure that useful information is preserved and reused. We study continual context consolidation: writing current context into model weights while limiting interference with previously consolidated information. We propose Self-Consolidating Language Models (SCoL), a post-training framework in which, given current context, an LLM learns to generate textual update instructions specifying which of its own Transformer layers should be updated. Because committed updates change the model that later generates future selections, we train SCoL with meta-reinforcement learning over an evolving model state. We instantiate SCoL with supervised QA rewards on SQuAD knowledge incorporation and intrinsic likelihood-based rewards for LongBench v2 long-context consolidation. Across both settings, SCoL improves acquisition and retention over prompting, summarization, batch test-time training, and sequential finetuning baselines. Analysis of learned selection patterns shows that SCoL encourages the LLM to generate sparse update locations that align with layers of high Fisher information, suggesting that the model learns to route plasticity toward loss-sensitive regions while limiting interference. Moreover, SCoL transfers from shorter meta-training streams to longer LongBench v2 streams at evaluation, suggesting that our framework supports scalable streaming consolidation.

Spoken dialogue generation is crucial for applications like podcasts, dynamic commentary, and entertainment content, but poses significant challenges compared to single-utterance text-to-speech (TTS). Key requirements include accurate turn-taking, cross-turn acoustic consistency, and long-form stability, which current models often fail to address due to a lack of dialogue context modeling. To bridge this gap, we present MOSS-TTSD, a spoken dialogue synthesis model designed for expressive, multi-party conversational speech across multiple languages. With enhanced long-context modeling, MOSS-TTSD generates long-form spoken conversations from dialogue scripts with explicit speaker tags, supporting up to 60 minutes of single-pass synthesis, multi-party dialogue with up to 5 speakers, and zero-shot voice cloning from a short reference audio clip. The model supports various mainstream languages, including English and Chinese, and is adapted to several long-form scenarios. Additionally, to address limitations of existing evaluation methods, we propose TTSD-eval, an objective evaluation framework based on forced alignment that measures speaker attribution accuracy and speaker similarity without relying on speaker diarization tools. Both objective and subjective evaluation results show that MOSS-TTSD surpasses strong open-source and proprietary baselines in dialogue synthesis.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in leveraging extensive external knowledge to enhance responses in multi-turn and agentic applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, processing long-context inputs introduces significant system latency and demands substantial memory for the key-value cache, resulting in reduced throughput and a fundamental trade-off between knowledge enrichment and system efficiency. While minimizing latency for long-context inputs is a primary objective for LLMs, we contend that RAG require specialized consideration. In RAG, much of the LLM context consists of concatenated passages from retrieval, with only a small subset directly relevant to the query. These passages often exhibit low semantic similarity due to diversity or deduplication during re-ranking, leading to block-diagonal attention patterns that differ from those in standard LLM generation tasks. Based on this observation, we argue that most computations over the RAG context during decoding are unnecessary and can be eliminated with minimal impact on performance. To this end, we propose REFRAG, an efficient decoding framework that compresses, senses, and expands to improve latency in RAG applications. By exploiting the sparsity structure, we demonstrate a 30.85 the time-to-first-token acceleration (3.75 improvement to previous work) without loss in perplexity. In addition, our optimization framework for large context enables REFRAG to extend the context size of LLMs by 16. We provide rigorous validation of REFRAG across diverse long-context tasks, including RAG, multi-turn conversations, and long document summarization, spanning a wide range of datasets. Experimental results confirm that REFRAG delivers substantial speedup with no loss in accuracy compared to LLaMA models and other state-of-the-art baselines across various context sizes.

Multi-turn dialogues are essential in many real-world applications of large language models, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. As conversation histories become longer, existing large language models face increasing computational and memory challenges, which hinder their ability to provide efficient and responsive interactions. Most current acceleration methods either compress the context or optimize key value caching, but they often rely on fixed or position-based heuristics that do not adapt well to the dynamic and unpredictable patterns found in actual multi-turn conversations. In this paper, we present LoopServe, an adaptive dual-phase inference acceleration framework for large language models in multi-turn dialogues. LoopServe introduces two main innovations. First, it performs online sparsification during the prefilling phase by dynamically selecting the most important parts of the attention matrix for each new input. Second, it uses progressive key value compression during decoding by adaptively maintaining a relevant and efficient cache based on the most recently generated output tokens. We also propose a https://huggingface.co/datasets/TreeAILab/Multi-turn_Long-context_Benchmark_for_LLMs{new benchmark} with eleven multi-turn datasets that reflect realistic query positions and conversational dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoopServe consistently achieves superior effectiveness compared to existing baselines and significantly accelerates LLM inference across a wide range of long-context dialogue tasks.

The key-value (KV) cache is a foundational optimization in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), eliminating redundant recomputation of past token representations during autoregressive generation. However, its memory footprint scales linearly with context length, imposing critical bottlenecks on GPU memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and inference throughput as production LLMs push context windows from thousands to millions of tokens. Efficient KV cache management has thus become a first-order challenge for scalable LLM deployment. This paper provides a systematic review of recent KV cache optimization techniques, organizing them into five principal directions: cache eviction, cache compression, hybrid memory solutions, novel attention mechanisms, and combination strategies. For each category we analyze the underlying mechanisms, deployment trade-offs, and empirical performance across memory reduction, throughput, and model accuracy metrics. We further map techniques to seven practical deployment scenarios, including long-context single requests, high-throughput datacenter serving, edge devices, multi-turn conversations, and accuracy-critical reasoning, providing actionable guidance for practitioners selecting among competing approaches. Our analysis reveals that no single technique dominates across all settings; instead, the optimal strategy depends on context length, hardware constraints, and workload characteristics, pointing toward adaptive, multi-stage optimization pipelines as a promising direction for future research.

Generating natural and meaningful responses to communicate with multi-modal human inputs is a fundamental capability of Large Vision-Language Models(LVLMs). While current open-source LVLMs demonstrate promising performance in simplified scenarios such as single-turn single-image input, they fall short in real-world conversation scenarios such as following instructions in a long context history with multi-turn and multi-images. Existing LVLM benchmarks primarily focus on single-choice questions or short-form responses, which do not adequately assess the capabilities of LVLMs in real-world human-AI interaction applications. Therefore, we introduce MMDU, a comprehensive benchmark, and MMDU-45k, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset, designed to evaluate and improve LVLMs' abilities in multi-turn and multi-image conversations. We employ the clustering algorithm to ffnd the relevant images and textual descriptions from the open-source Wikipedia and construct the question-answer pairs by human annotators with the assistance of the GPT-4o model. MMDU has a maximum of 18k image+text tokens, 20 images, and 27 turns, which is at least 5x longer than previous benchmarks and poses challenges to current LVLMs. Our in-depth analysis of 15 representative LVLMs using MMDU reveals that open-source LVLMs lag behind closed-source counterparts due to limited conversational instruction tuning data. We demonstrate that ffne-tuning open-source LVLMs on MMDU-45k signiffcantly address this gap, generating longer and more accurate conversations, and improving scores on MMDU and existing benchmarks (MMStar: +1.1%, MathVista: +1.5%, ChartQA:+1.2%). Our contributions pave the way for bridging the gap between current LVLM models and real-world application demands. This project is available at https://github.com/Liuziyu77/MMDU.

Recent Large Language Models have been enhanced with vision capabilities, enabling them to comprehend images, videos, and interleaved vision-language content. However, the learning methods of these large multimodal models typically treat videos as predetermined clips, making them less effective and efficient at handling streaming video inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning-In-Video-Stream (LIVE) framework, which enables temporally aligned, long-context, and real-time conversation within a continuous video stream. Our LIVE framework comprises comprehensive approaches to achieve video streaming dialogue, encompassing: (1) a training objective designed to perform language modeling for continuous streaming inputs, (2) a data generation scheme that converts offline temporal annotations into a streaming dialogue format, and (3) an optimized inference pipeline to speed up the model responses in real-world video streams. With our LIVE framework, we built VideoLLM-online model upon Llama-2/Llama-3 and demonstrate its significant advantages in processing streaming videos. For instance, on average, our model can support streaming dialogue in a 5-minute video clip at over 10 FPS on an A100 GPU. Moreover, it also showcases state-of-the-art performance on public offline video benchmarks, such as recognition, captioning, and forecasting. The code, model, data, and demo have been made available at https://showlab.github.io/videollm-online.

Memory and computation remain core bottlenecks in long-horizon LLM inference due to the quadratic cost of self-attention and the ever-growing key-value (KV) cache. Existing strategies for memory-bounded inference, such as quantization, offloading, or heuristic KV eviction, either incur high orchestration costs or rely on unreliable attention-based proxies of importance. We propose TRIM-KV, a novel approach that learns each token's intrinsic importance at creation time via a lightweight retention gate. Each gate predicts a scalar retention score that decays over time, reflecting the long-term utility of the token for a specific layer and head. Tokens with low scores are evicted when the memory budget is exceeded, ensuring that the cache always contains the most critical tokens. TRIM-KV is trained efficiently through distillation from a frozen LLM combined with a capacity loss, requiring only gate fine-tuning and adding negligible inference overhead. Across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH-500, AIME24), procedural generation (LongProc), conversational long-memory benchmarks (LongMemEval), and long-context understanding (LongBench and SCBench), TRIM-KV consistently outperforms strong eviction and learnable retrieval baselines, especially in low-memory regimes. Remarkably, it even surpasses full-cache models in some settings, showing that selective retention can serve as a form of regularization, suppressing noise from uninformative tokens. Qualitative analyses further reveal that learned retention scores align with human intuition, naturally recovering heuristics such as sink tokens, sliding windows, and gist compression without explicit design. Beyond efficiency, retention scores provide insights into layer- and head-specific roles, suggesting a new path toward LLM interpretability.

There has recently been growing interest in conversational agents with long-term memory which has led to the rapid development of language models that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Until recently, most work on RAG has focused on information retrieval from large databases of texts, like Wikipedia, rather than information from long-form conversations. In this paper, we argue that effective retrieval from long-form conversational data faces two unique problems compared to static database retrieval: 1) time/event-based queries, which requires the model to retrieve information about previous conversations based on time or the order of a conversational event (e.g., the third conversation on Tuesday), and 2) ambiguous queries that require surrounding conversational context to understand. To better develop RAG-based agents that can deal with these challenges, we generate a new dataset of ambiguous and time-based questions that build upon a recent dataset of long-form, simulated conversations, and demonstrate that standard RAG based approaches handle such questions poorly. We then develop a novel retrieval model which combines chained-of-table search methods, standard vector-database retrieval, and a prompting method to disambiguate queries, and demonstrate that this approach substantially improves over current methods at solving these tasks. We believe that this new dataset and more advanced RAG agent can act as a key benchmark and stepping stone towards effective memory augmented conversational agents that can be used in a wide variety of AI applications.

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), the central question is how the conversational agent can naturally ask for user preferences and provide suitable recommendations. Existing works mainly follow the hierarchical architecture, where a higher policy decides whether to invoke the conversation module (to ask questions) or the recommendation module (to make recommendations). This architecture prevents these two components from fully interacting with each other. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel architecture, the long short-term feedback architecture, to connect these two essential components in CRS. Specifically, the recommendation predicts the long-term recommendation target based on the conversational context and the user history. Driven by the targeted recommendation, the conversational model predicts the next topic or attribute to verify if the user preference matches the target. The balance feedback loop continues until the short-term planner output matches the long-term planner output, that is when the system should make the recommendation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive fluency and task competence in conversational settings. However, their effectiveness in multi-session and long-term interactions is hindered by limited memory persistence. Typical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems store dialogue history as dense vectors, which capture semantic similarity but neglect finer linguistic structures such as syntactic dependencies, discourse relations, and coreference links. We propose Semantic Anchoring, a hybrid agentic memory architecture that enriches vector-based storage with explicit linguistic cues to improve recall of nuanced, context-rich exchanges. Our approach combines dependency parsing, discourse relation tagging, and coreference resolution to create structured memory entries. Experiments on adapted long-term dialogue datasets show that semantic anchoring improves factual recall and discourse coherence by up to 18% over strong RAG baselines. We further conduct ablation studies, human evaluations, and error analysis to assess robustness and interpretability.

Long-term, open-domain dialogue capabilities are essential for chatbots aiming to recall past interactions and demonstrate emotional intelligence (EI). Yet, most existing research relies on synthetic, LLM-generated data, leaving open questions about real-world conversational patterns. To address this gap, we introduce REALTALK, a 21-day corpus of authentic messaging app dialogues, providing a direct benchmark against genuine human interactions. We first conduct a dataset analysis, focusing on EI attributes and persona consistency to understand the unique challenges posed by real-world dialogues. By comparing with LLM-generated conversations, we highlight key differences, including diverse emotional expressions and variations in persona stability that synthetic dialogues often fail to capture. Building on these insights, we introduce two benchmark tasks: (1) persona simulation where a model continues a conversation on behalf of a specific user given prior dialogue context; and (2) memory probing where a model answers targeted questions requiring long-term memory of past interactions. Our findings reveal that models struggle to simulate a user solely from dialogue history, while fine-tuning on specific user chats improves persona emulation. Additionally, existing models face significant challenges in recalling and leveraging long-term context within real-world conversations.

In the field of natural language processing, open-domain chatbots have emerged as an important research topic. However, a major limitation of existing open-domain chatbot research is its singular focus on short single-session dialogue, neglecting the potential need for understanding contextual information in multiple consecutive sessions that precede an ongoing dialogue. Among the elements that compose the context in multi-session conversation settings, the time intervals between sessions and the relationships between speakers would be particularly important. Despite their importance, current research efforts have not sufficiently addressed these dialogical components. In this paper, we introduce a new 1M multi-session dialogue dataset, called Conversation Chronicles, for implementing a long-term conversation setup in which time intervals and fine-grained speaker relationships are incorporated. Following recent works, we exploit a large language model to produce the data. The extensive human evaluation shows that dialogue episodes in Conversation Chronicles reflect those properties while maintaining coherent and consistent interactions across all the sessions. We also propose a dialogue model, called ReBot, which consists of chronological summarization and dialogue generation modules using only around 630M parameters. When trained on Conversation Chronicles, ReBot demonstrates long-term context understanding with a high human engagement score.

Automated Program Repair (APR) can help developers automatically generate patches for bugs. Due to the impressive performance obtained using Large Pre-Trained Language Models (LLMs) on many code related tasks, researchers have started to directly use LLMs for APR. However, prior approaches simply repeatedly sample the LLM given the same constructed input/prompt created from the original buggy code, which not only leads to generating the same incorrect patches repeatedly but also miss the critical information in testcases. To address these limitations, we propose conversational APR, a new paradigm for program repair that alternates between patch generation and validation in a conversational manner. In conversational APR, we iteratively build the input to the model by combining previously generated patches with validation feedback. As such, we leverage the long-term context window of LLMs to not only avoid generating previously incorrect patches but also incorporate validation feedback to help the model understand the semantic meaning of the program under test. We evaluate 10 different LLM including the newly developed ChatGPT model to demonstrate the improvement of conversational APR over the prior LLM for APR approach.

We present PersonaConvBench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating personalized reasoning and generation in multi-turn conversations with large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing work that focuses on either personalization or conversational structure in isolation, PersonaConvBench integrates both, offering three core tasks: sentence classification, impact regression, and user-centric text generation across ten diverse Reddit-based domains. This design enables systematic analysis of how personalized conversational context shapes LLM outputs in realistic multi-user scenarios. We benchmark several commercial and open-source LLMs under a unified prompting setup and observe that incorporating personalized history yields substantial performance improvements, including a 198 percent relative gain over the best non-conversational baseline in sentiment classification. By releasing PersonaConvBench with evaluations and code, we aim to support research on LLMs that adapt to individual styles, track long-term context, and produce contextually rich, engaging responses.

Mental health has increasingly become a global issue that reveals the limitations of traditional conversational psychotherapy, constrained by location, time, expense, and privacy concerns. In response to these challenges, we introduce SoulSpeak, a Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled chatbot designed to democratize access to psychotherapy. SoulSpeak improves upon the capabilities of standard LLM-enabled chatbots by incorporating a novel dual-memory component that combines short-term and long-term context via Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to offer personalized responses while ensuring the preservation of user privacy and intimacy through a dedicated privacy module. In addition, it leverages a counseling chat dataset of therapist-client interactions and various prompting techniques to align the generated responses with psychotherapeutic methods. We introduce two fine-tuned BERT models to evaluate the system against existing LLMs and human therapists: the Conversational Psychotherapy Preference Model (CPPM) to simulate human preference among responses and another to assess response relevance to user input. CPPM is useful for training and evaluating psychotherapy-focused language models independent from SoulSpeak, helping with the constrained resources available for psychotherapy. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the dual-memory component and the robustness of the privacy module are also examined. Our findings highlight the potential and challenge of enhancing mental health care by offering an alternative that combines the expertise of traditional therapy with the advantages of LLMs, providing a promising way to address the accessibility and personalization gap in current mental health services.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has attracted growing attention in recent years as a result of the advancement and implementation of human-computer interface technologies. However, previous approaches to modeling global and local context dependencies lost the diversity of dependency information and do not take the context dependency into account at the classification level. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to dependency modeling driven by Emotional Inertia and Contagion (EmotionIC) for conversational emotion recognition at the feature extraction and classification levels. At the feature extraction level, our designed Identity Masked Multi-head Attention (IM-MHA) captures the identity-based long-distant context in the dialogue to contain the diverse influence of different participants and construct the global emotional atmosphere, while the devised Dialogue-based Gate Recurrent Unit (DialogGRU) that aggregates the emotional tendencies of dyadic dialogue is applied to refine the contextual features with inter- and intra-speaker dependencies. At the classification level, by introducing skip connections in Conditional Random Field (CRF), we elaborate the Skip-chain CRF (SkipCRF) to capture the high-order dependencies within and between speakers, and to emulate the emotional flow of distant participants. Experimental results show that our method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art models on four benchmark datasets. The ablation studies confirm that our modules can effectively model emotional inertia and contagion.

As large language models~(LLMs) become widely adopted, ensuring their alignment with human values is crucial to prevent jailbreaks where adversaries manipulate models to produce harmful content. While most defenses target single-turn attacks, real-world usage often involves multi-turn dialogues, exposing models to attacks that exploit conversational context to bypass safety measures. We introduce MUSE, a comprehensive framework tackling multi-turn jailbreaks from both attack and defense angles. For attacks, we propose MUSE-A, a method that uses frame semantics and heuristic tree search to explore diverse semantic trajectories. For defense, we present MUSE-D, a fine-grained safety alignment approach that intervenes early in dialogues to reduce vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments on various models show that MUSE effectively identifies and mitigates multi-turn vulnerabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/yansiyu02/MUSE{https://github.com/yansiyu02/MUSE}.

Although LLM agents can leverage tools for complex tasks, they still need memory to maintain cross-turn consistency and accumulate reusable information in long-horizon interactions. However, retrieval-based external memory systems incur low online overhead but suffer from unstable accuracy due to limited query construction and candidate filtering. In contrast, many systems use repeated large-model calls for online memory operations, improving accuracy but accumulating latency over long interactions. We propose LightMem, a lightweight memory system for better agent memory driven by Small Language Models (SLMs). LightMem modularizes memory retrieval, writing, and long-term consolidation, and separates online processing from offline consolidation to enable efficient memory invocation under bounded compute. We organize memory into short-term memory (STM) for immediate conversational context, mid-term memory (MTM) for reusable interaction summaries, and long-term memory (LTM) for consolidated knowledge, and uses user identifiers to support independent retrieval and incremental maintenance in multi-user settings. Online, LightMem operates under a fixed retrieval budget and selects memories via a two-stage procedure: vector-based coarse retrieval followed by semantic consistency re-ranking. Offline, it abstracts reusable interaction evidence and incrementally integrates it into LTM. Experiments show consistent gains across model scales, with an average F1 improvement of about 2.5 over A-MEM on LoCoMo, while achieving higher efficiency and low median latency (83 ms for retrieval and 581 ms end-to-end).

Recent advances in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, driven by large language models (LLMs) with extensive API and tool integration, have enabled conversational agents to coordinate interleaved goals, maintain long-horizon context, and act proactively through asynchronous execution. These capabilities extend beyond traditional TOD systems, yet existing benchmarks lack systematic support for evaluating such agentic behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce ATOD, a benchmark and synthetic dialogue generation pipeline that produces richly annotated conversations requiring long-term reasoning. ATOD captures key characteristics of advanced TOD, including multi-goal coordination, dependency management, memory, adaptability, and proactivity. Building on ATOD, we propose ATOD-Eval, a holistic evaluation framework that translates these dimensions into fine-grained metrics and supports reproducible offline and online evaluation. We further present a strong agentic memory-based evaluator for benchmarking on ATOD. Experiments show that ATOD-Eval enables comprehensive assessment across task completion, agentic capability, and response quality, and that the proposed evaluator offers a better accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to existing memory- and LLM-based approaches under this evaluation setting.

Memorizing and utilizing speakers' personas is a common practice for response generation in long-term conversations. Yet, human-authored datasets often provide uninformative persona sentences that hinder response quality. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages commonsense-based persona expansion to address such issues in long-term conversation. While prior work focuses on not producing personas that contradict others, we focus on transforming contradictory personas into sentences that contain rich speaker information, by refining them based on their contextual backgrounds with designed strategies. As the pioneer of persona expansion in multi-session settings, our framework facilitates better response generation via human-like persona refinement. The supplementary video of our work is available at https://caffeine-15bbf.web.app/.

Long-term conversational agents require effective memory management to handle dialogue histories that exceed the context window of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods based on fact extraction or summarization reduce redundancy but struggle to organize and retrieve relevant information across different granularities of dialogue and generated memory. We introduce SGMem (Sentence Graph Memory), which represents dialogue as sentence-level graphs within chunked units, capturing associations across turn-, round-, and session-level contexts. By combining retrieved raw dialogue with generated memory such as summaries, facts and insights, SGMem supplies LLMs with coherent and relevant context for response generation. Experiments on LongMemEval and LoCoMo show that SGMem consistently improves accuracy and outperforms strong baselines in long-term conversational question answering.

Long-horizon conversational agents have to manage ever-growing interaction histories that quickly exceed the finite context windows of large language models (LLMs). Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, often leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. We present TiMem, a temporal--hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree (TMT), enabling systematic memory consolidation from raw conversational observations to progressively abstracted persona representations. TiMem is characterized by three core properties: (1) temporal--hierarchical organization through TMT; (2) semantic-guided consolidation that enables memory integration across hierarchical levels without fine-tuning; and (3) complexity-aware memory recall that balances precision and efficiency across queries of varying complexity. Under a consistent evaluation setup, TiMem achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both benchmarks, reaching 75.30% on LoCoMo and 76.88% on LongMemEval-S. It outperforms all evaluated baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20% on LoCoMo. Manifold analysis indicates clear persona separation on LoCoMo and reduced dispersion on LongMemEval-S. Overall, TiMem treats temporal continuity as a first-class organizing principle for long-horizon memory in conversational agents.

Long-horizon conversational agents rely on memory systems with increasingly sophisticated retrieval mechanisms. However, retrieved fragments are typically fed to the language model as unstructured text, lacking the relational, temporal, and thematic structures essential for complex reasoning. To bridge this reasoning gap, we introduce GRAVITY (Generation-time Relational Anchoring Via Injected Topological MemorY), a plug-and-play structured memory module. GRAVITY extracts three complementary knowledge representations from raw conversational utterances: entity profiles grounded in relational graphs, temporal event tuples linked into causal traces, and cross-session topic summaries. At generation time, it injects these representations into the host system's prompt as structured anchoring contexts. This approach effectively synthesizes scattered evidence into a coherent, query-relevant context without requiring any architectural modifications to the host model. Extensive evaluations across five diverse memory systems on the LongMemEval and LoCoMo benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. On average, GRAVITY improves LLM-judge accuracy by 7.5--10.1%. Gains are inversely correlated with baseline strength: the weakest host improves by 12.2% while the strongest still gains 3.8--5.7%. These findings establish structured context anchoring as a broadly effective, architecture-agnostic augmentation paradigm for long-horizon conversational memory.

LLM-based conversational agents still struggle to maintain coherent, personalized interaction over many sessions: fixed context windows limit how much history can be kept in view, and most external memory approaches trade off between coarse retrieval over large chunks and fine-grained but fragmented views of the dialogue. Motivated by neo-Davidsonian event semantics, we propose an event-centric alternative that represents conversational history as short, event-like propositions which bundle together participants, temporal cues, and minimal local context, rather than as independent relation triples or opaque summaries. In contrast to work that aggressively compresses or forgets past content, our design aims to preserve information in a non-compressive form and make it more accessible, rather than more lossy. Concretely, we instruct an LLM to decompose each session into enriched elementary discourse units (EDUs) -- self-contained statements with normalized entities and source turn attributions -- and organize sessions, EDUs, and their arguments in a heterogeneous graph that supports associative recall. On top of this representation we build two simple retrieval-based variants that use dense similarity search and LLM filtering, with an optional graph-based propagation step to connect and aggregate evidence across related EDUs. Experiments on the LoCoMo and LongMemEval_S benchmarks show that these event-centric memories match or surpass strong baselines, while operating with much shorter QA contexts. Our results suggest that structurally simple, event-level memory provides a principled and practical foundation for long-horizon conversational agents. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/KevinSRR/EMem.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have extended context lengths, enabling assistants to sustain long histories for coherent, personalized responses. This ability, however, hinges on Key-Value (KV) caching, whose memory grows linearly with dialogue length and quickly dominates under strict resource constraints. An active line of research for reducing this overhead is KV cache compression, which seeks to limit cache size while preserving accuracy. Yet existing methods face two major limitations: (i) evicting entries after full-context prefill causes unbounded peak memory, and (ii) query-dependent eviction narrows the cache to a single query, leading to degraded accuracy in multi-turn conversations. We introduce EpiCache, a training-free KV cache management framework for long conversational question answering (LongConvQA) under fixed memory budgets. EpiCache bounds cache growth through block-wise prefill and preserves topic-relevant context via episodic KV compression, which clusters conversation history into coherent episodes and applies episode-specific KV cache eviction. We further design an adaptive layer-wise budget allocation strategy that measures each layer's sensitivity to eviction and distributes the memory budget across layers accordingly. Across three LongConvQA benchmarks, EpiCache improves accuracy by up to 40% over recent baselines, sustains near-full KV accuracy under 4-6x compression, and reduces latency and memory by up to 2.4x and 3.5x, thereby enabling efficient multi-turn interaction under strict resource constraints.

Current dialogue generation approaches typically require the complete dialogue text before synthesis and produce a single, inseparable speech containing all voices, making them unsuitable for interactive chat; moreover, they suffer from unstable synthesis, inaccurate speaker transitions, and incoherent prosody. In this work, we present FireRedTTS-2, a long-form streaming TTS system for multi-speaker dialogue generation, delivering stable, natural speech with reliable speaker switching and context-aware prosody. A new 12.5Hz streaming speech tokenizer accelerates training and inference, extends maximum dialogue length, encodes richer semantics to stabilize text-to-token modeling and supports high-fidelity streaming generation for real-time applications. We adopt a text-speech interleaved format, concatenating speaker-labeled text with aligned speech tokens in chronological order, and model it with a dual-transformer: a large decoder-only transformer predicts tokens at the first layer, and a smaller one completes subsequent layers. Experimental results show that FireRedTTS-2 integrates seamlessly with chat frameworks and, with minimal fine-tuning, produces emotionally expressive speech guided by implicit contextual cues. In podcast generation, it surpasses existing systems including MoonCast, Zipvoice-Dialogue, and MOSS-TTSD in objective intelligibility, speaker-turn reliability, and perceived naturalness with context-consistent prosody. Our demos are available at https://fireredteam.github.io/demos/firered_tts_2.

Personalized large language models (PLLMs) have garnered significant attention for their ability to align outputs with individual's needs and preferences. However, they still struggle with long-horizon tasks, such as tracking a user's extensive history of conversations or activities. Existing memory mechanisms often fail to capture evolving behaviors, and RAG paradigms are trapped by a quality-efficiency tradeoff. Meanwhile, parametric adaptation is bottlenecked by train-inference gap due to the scarcity of labeled data. To enhance the long-horizon capabilities of PLLMs, we introduce TSUBASA, a two-pronged approach designed to improve memory writing via dynamic memory evolution, and memory reading via self-learning with a context distillation objective to internalize user experiences. Extensive evaluations on long-horizon benchmarks using the Qwen-3 model family (4B to 32B) validate the effectiveness of TSUBASA, surpassing competitive memory-augmented systems that rely primarily on memory writing, such as Mem0 and Memory-R1. Our analyses further confirms that TSUBASA breaks the quality-efficiency barrier to achieve Pareto improvements, delivering robust, high-fidelity personalization with a reduced token budget.

Long-term conversational agents need to remember and query cross-session, multi-typed information with complex correlations. Existing agent memory systems rely on heterogeneous vector and graph databases, which fragment memory information and cause high cross-database I/O latency. For retrieval, common RAG-style methods tend to introduce noise, miss correlated clues, and lack token budget control, degrading LLM accuracy and efficiency. We propose Mandol, an agglomerative memory system that consolidates fragmented memory representations and storage into a unified memory-native architecture. Its core components include: (1) a hierarchical memory model that organizes memory into a basic layer representing raw memory information and a high-level abstract layer that agglomerates basic memories into traceable abstract memories, both uniformly represented as structured semantic graphs; (2) an agglomerative semantic data structure combining SemanticMap and SemanticGraph, which natively fuses key-value, vector, and graph structures and provides unified hybrid retrieval operators to eliminate cross-database I/O; and (3) a quantitative query mechanism with query-adaptive routing, quantitative denoising and conflict resolution, and token-constrained context generation, all without involving LLMs during retrieval. Experiments on two widely used long-term conversation benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval, show that Mandol achieves the best overall accuracy among representative agent memory systems. For performance comparison, Mandol also obtains a 5.4x retrieval speedup and a 4.8x insertion speedup under 10 QPS concurrent load, while still maintaining low latency on consumer-grade hardware.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been widely adopted in conversational agents. However, the increasingly long interactions between users and agents accumulate extensive dialogue records, making it difficult for LLMs with limited context windows to maintain a coherent long-term dialogue memory and deliver personalized responses. While retrieval-augmented memory systems have emerged to address this issue, existing methods often depend on single-granularity memory segmentation and retrieval. This approach falls short in capturing deep memory connections, leading to partial retrieval of useful information or substantial noise, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle these limits, we propose MemGAS, a framework that enhances memory consolidation by constructing multi-granularity association, adaptive selection, and retrieval. MemGAS is based on multi-granularity memory units and employs Gaussian Mixture Models to cluster and associate new memories with historical ones. An entropy-based router adaptively selects optimal granularity by evaluating query relevance distributions and balancing information completeness and noise. Retrieved memories are further refined via LLM-based filtering. Experiments on four long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that MemGAS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both question answer and retrieval tasks, achieving superior performance across different query types and top-K settings.

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have greatly improved speech naturalness, speaker similarity, and controllability. However, most existing controllable TTS systems still rely on explicit user-provided style prompts, making it difficult to automatically determine how a sentence should be spoken in long and complex conversational scenarios. This proposal introduces the ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge, which aims to evaluate whether a system can infer the intended speaking manner from contextual information and generate speech consistent with both the reasoning output and the surrounding scene. The challenge contains two tracks: text-context-aware CoT-TTS and audio-context-aware CoT-TTS. We construct a large-scale bilingual training set from speech-rich media and provide carefully filtered evaluation data for leaderboard comparison. Each system is required to output both a chain-of-thought reasoning analysis and the generated speech waveform. The official evaluation combines objective metrics, multimodal LLM-based evaluation, and human subjective assessment. To facilitate reproducibility, we provide inference code together with a fine-tuning recipe for a 0.6B Qwen3-based model trained via a three-stage strategy. This challenge is expected to support research on context understanding, chain-of-thought reasoning, and expressive speech generation for applications such as film dubbing, audiobook production, virtual characters, and spoken dialogue agents. Further information about the associated challenge is available at:https://iscslp2026-cot-tts.github.io/challenge-website/

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy userleftrightarrowagent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.

Recent works on context and memory benchmarking have primarily focused on conversational instances but the need for evaluating memory in dynamic enterprise environments is crucial for its effective application. We introduce MEMTRACK, a benchmark designed to evaluate long-term memory and state tracking in multi-platform agent environments. MEMTRACK models realistic organizational workflows by integrating asynchronous events across multiple communication and productivity platforms such as Slack, Linear and Git. Each benchmark instance provides a chronologically platform-interleaved timeline, with noisy, conflicting, cross-referring information as well as potential codebase/file-system comprehension and exploration. Consequently, our benchmark tests memory capabilities such as acquistion, selection and conflict resolution. We curate the MEMTRACK dataset through both manual expert driven design and scalable agent based synthesis, generating ecologically valid scenarios grounded in real world software development processes. We introduce pertinent metrics for Correctness, Efficiency, and Redundancy that capture the effectiveness of memory mechanisms beyond simple QA performance. Experiments across SoTA LLMs and memory backends reveal challenges in utilizing memory across long horizons, handling cross-platform dependencies, and resolving contradictions. Notably, the best performing GPT-5 model only achieves a 60\% Correctness score on MEMTRACK. This work provides an extensible framework for advancing evaluation research for memory-augmented agents, beyond existing focus on conversational setups, and sets the stage for multi-agent, multi-platform memory benchmarking in complex organizational settings

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly improved their context windows, yet challenges in effective long-term memory management remain. We introduce MemTree, an algorithm that leverages a dynamic, tree-structured memory representation to optimize the organization, retrieval, and integration of information, akin to human cognitive schemas. MemTree organizes memory hierarchically, with each node encapsulating aggregated textual content, corresponding semantic embeddings, and varying abstraction levels across the tree's depths. Our algorithm dynamically adapts this memory structure by computing and comparing semantic embeddings of new and existing information to enrich the model's context-awareness. This approach allows MemTree to handle complex reasoning and extended interactions more effectively than traditional memory augmentation methods, which often rely on flat lookup tables. Evaluations on benchmarks for multi-turn dialogue understanding and document question answering show that MemTree significantly enhances performance in scenarios that demand structured memory management.

Large language models (LLMs) have received significant attention by achieving remarkable performance across various tasks. However, their fixed context length poses challenges when processing long documents or maintaining extended conversations. This paper proposes a method called Selective Context that employs self-information to filter out less informative content, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the fixed context length. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on tasks of summarisation and question answering across different data sources, including academic papers, news articles, and conversation transcripts.

Transformer-based language models (LMs) track contextual information through large, hard-coded input windows. We introduce MemoryPrompt, a leaner approach in which the LM is complemented by a small auxiliary recurrent network that passes information to the LM by prefixing its regular input with a sequence of vectors, akin to soft prompts, without requiring LM finetuning. Tested on a task designed to probe a LM's ability to keep track of multiple fact updates, a MemoryPrompt-augmented LM outperforms much larger LMs that have access to the full input history. We also test MemoryPrompt on a long-distance dialogue dataset, where its performance is comparable to that of a model conditioned on the entire conversation history. In both experiments we also observe that, unlike full-finetuning approaches, MemoryPrompt does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new tasks, thus not disrupting the generalist capabilities of the underlying LM.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit remarkable conversational and reasoning capabilities but remain constrained by limited context windows and the lack of persistent memory. Recent efforts address these limitations via external memory architectures, often employing graph-based representations, yet most adopt flat, entangled structures that intertwine semantics with topology, leading to redundant representations, unstructured retrieval, and degraded efficiency and accuracy. To resolve these issues, we propose LiCoMemory, an end-to-end agentic memory framework for real-time updating and retrieval, which introduces CogniGraph, a lightweight hierarchical graph that utilizes entities and relations as semantic indexing layers, and employs temporal and hierarchy-aware search with integrated reranking for adaptive and coherent knowledge retrieval. Experiments on long-term dialogue benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval, show that LiCoMemory not only outperforms established baselines in temporal reasoning, multi-session consistency, and retrieval efficiency, but also notably reduces update latency. Our official code and data are available at https://github.com/EverM0re/LiCoMemory.

This paper introduces RAISE (Reasoning and Acting through Scratchpad and Examples), an advanced architecture enhancing the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into conversational agents. RAISE, an enhancement of the ReAct framework, incorporates a dual-component memory system, mirroring human short-term and long-term memory, to maintain context and continuity in conversations. It entails a comprehensive agent construction scenario, including phases like Conversation Selection, Scene Extraction, CoT Completion, and Scene Augmentation, leading to the LLMs Training phase. This approach appears to enhance agent controllability and adaptability in complex, multi-turn dialogues. Our preliminary evaluations in a real estate sales context suggest that RAISE has some advantages over traditional agents, indicating its potential for broader applications. This work contributes to the AI field by providing a robust framework for developing more context-aware and versatile conversational agents.

Large language models (LLMs) deployed in user-facing applications require long-horizon consistency: the ability to remember prior interactions, respect user preferences, and ground reasoning in past events. However, contemporary memory systems often adopt complex architectures such as knowledge graphs, multi-stage retrieval pipelines, and OS-style schedulers, which introduce engineering complexity and reproducibility challenges. We present ENGRAM, a lightweight memory system that organizes conversation into three canonical memory types (episodic, semantic, and procedural) through a single router and retriever. Each user turn is converted into typed memory records with normalized schemas and embeddings and stored in a database. At query time, the system retrieves top-k dense neighbors for each type, merges results with simple set operations, and provides the most relevant evidence as context to the model. ENGRAM attains state-of-the-art results on LoCoMo, a multi-session conversational QA benchmark for long-horizon memory, and exceeds the full-context baseline by 15 points on LongMemEval while using only about 1% of the tokens. These results show that careful memory typing and straightforward dense retrieval can enable effective long-term memory management in language models without requiring complex architectures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable prowess in generating contextually coherent responses, yet their fixed context windows pose fundamental challenges for maintaining consistency over prolonged multi-session dialogues. We introduce Mem0, a scalable memory-centric architecture that addresses this issue by dynamically extracting, consolidating, and retrieving salient information from ongoing conversations. Building on this foundation, we further propose an enhanced variant that leverages graph-based memory representations to capture complex relational structures among conversational elements. Through comprehensive evaluations on LOCOMO benchmark, we systematically compare our approaches against six baseline categories: (i) established memory-augmented systems, (ii) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with varying chunk sizes and k-values, (iii) a full-context approach that processes the entire conversation history, (iv) an open-source memory solution, (v) a proprietary model system, and (vi) a dedicated memory management platform. Empirical results show that our methods consistently outperform all existing memory systems across four question categories: single-hop, temporal, multi-hop, and open-domain. Notably, Mem0 achieves 26% relative improvements in the LLM-as-a-Judge metric over OpenAI, while Mem0 with graph memory achieves around 2% higher overall score than the base configuration. Beyond accuracy gains, we also markedly reduce computational overhead compared to full-context method. In particular, Mem0 attains a 91% lower p95 latency and saves more than 90% token cost, offering a compelling balance between advanced reasoning capabilities and practical deployment constraints. Our findings highlight critical role of structured, persistent memory mechanisms for long-term conversational coherence, paving the way for more reliable and efficient LLM-driven AI agents.

Recent advances in agentic AI have enabled agents to complete complex tasks through tool use, reasoning, and multi-step planning. Yet existing benchmarks evaluate agents within a single session, ignoring past actions, stated preferences, and prior decisions that agents must integrate to fulfill personalized user goals. We introduce Momento, a benchmark for persistent agentic task completion in multi-session service environments, requiring agents to take consequential, tool-mediated actions while resolving temporal dependencies and evolving user goals across sessions. Experimental results reveal that current agents fail primarily through misestimation of user state, treating prior session history as a reliable proxy for current context rather than stale information requiring re-validation, highlighting a substantial gap between current agent capabilities and realistic long-horizon human-agent interaction.

AI glasses present a compelling platform for AI agents to serve as personalized memory assistants. To be genuinely useful, such systems must move beyond short-term video comprehension and address memory gaps that humans experience for practical, personal, or social purposes over longitudinal egocentric video streams. However, existing egocentric datasets predominantly focus on action recognition or generic QAs from short clips, measuring perceptual capabilities rather than realistic human memory needs. We introduce SuperMemory-VQA, an egocentric visual question answering (VQA) dataset for evaluating AI assistants on practical, long-horizon memory tasks. It contains 52.9 hours of everyday activities recorded with AI glasses, including synchronized RGB video, audio transcription, eye gaze, IMU, and SLAM trajectories. Through a human-verified annotation pipeline, we construct grounded 4,853 question-answer pairs that span object and location memory, intent recall, visual scene recall, timeline reconstruction, conversational memory, and in-context retrieval. Each question is posed as multiple-choice with an explicit "unanswerable" option to test hallucination robustness. Benchmarking leading agentic frameworks and LLM backbones reveals that existing systems remain far from reliable on real-world memory tasks, highlighting the need for new architectures for grounded AI memory that can answer only when evidence is sufficient. A participant survey further supports that our questions are realistic, useful, and aligned with everyday memory needs.

We introduce MIRAGE, a new benchmark for multimodal expert-level reasoning and decision-making in consultative interaction settings. Designed for the agriculture domain, MIRAGE captures the full complexity of expert consultations by combining natural user queries, expert-authored responses, and image-based context, offering a high-fidelity benchmark for evaluating models on grounded reasoning, clarification strategies, and long-form generation in a real-world, knowledge-intensive domain. Grounded in over 35,000 real user-expert interactions and curated through a carefully designed multi-step pipeline, MIRAGE spans diverse crop health, pest diagnosis, and crop management scenarios. The benchmark includes more than 7,000 unique biological entities, covering plant species, pests, and diseases, making it one of the most taxonomically diverse benchmarks available for vision-language models, grounded in the real world. Unlike existing benchmarks that rely on well-specified user inputs and closed-set taxonomies, MIRAGE features underspecified, context-rich scenarios with open-world settings, requiring models to infer latent knowledge gaps, handle rare entities, and either proactively guide the interaction or respond. Project Page: https://mirage-benchmark.github.io

Multimodal AI agents increasingly rely on persistent long-term memory to ground generation in past visual and textual episodes. We show that unconditional trust in visual data creates a critical vulnerability. We propose Lucid, a black-box adversarial framework that compromises multimodal memory pipelines under a strictly image-bounded threat model, requiring no access to the target MLLM, target retrieval encoder, or the text channel. Lucid crafts imperceptible perturbations to enable two distinct failure modes based on the availability of historical context: (1) Memory poisoning, an in-context attack where the adversarial image replaces a benign one whose content is reinforced by prior textual context, reliably corrupting visual recall and steering the agent toward attacker-chosen narratives; (2) Memory injection, an out-of-context attack where the adversarial image replaces a benign one in a conversation turn devoid of prior textual grounding, causing the agent to generate attacker-influenced responses with no corrective signal from memory. We evaluate Lucid across various conversation domains and five black-box memory architectures, including graph-structured, LLM-summarized, and commercially deployed systems. Lucid achieves 61.6% ASR on poisoning and 58.4% ASR on injection, exposing a structural vulnerability in multimodal memory pipelines.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited the ability to effectively utilize external tools to address user queries. However, their performance may be limited in complex, multi-turn interactions involving users and multiple tools. To address this, we propose Magnet, a principled framework for synthesizing high-quality training trajectories to enhance the function calling capability of large language model agents in multi-turn conversations with humans. The framework is based on automatic and iterative translations from a function signature path to a sequence of queries and executable function calls. We model the complicated function interactions in multi-turn cases with graph and design novel node operations to build reliable signature paths. Motivated by context distillation, when guiding the generation of positive and negative trajectories using a teacher model, we provide reference function call sequences as positive hints in context and contrastive, incorrect function calls as negative hints. Experiments show that training with the positive trajectories with supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization against negative trajectories, our 14B model, Magnet-14B-mDPO, obtains 68.01 on BFCL-v3 and 73.30 on ToolQuery, surpassing the performance of the teacher model Gemini-1.5-pro-002 by a large margin in function calling.

A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval -- fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history -- "how many international trips did I take last year?" -- retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts -- such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier -- a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

Agent memory has been touted as a dimension of growth for LLM-based applications, enabling agents that can accumulate experience, adapt across sessions, and move beyond single-shot question answering. The current generation of agent memory systems treats memory as an external layer that extracts salient snippets from conversations, stores them in vector or graph-based stores, and retrieves top-k items into the prompt of an otherwise stateless model. While these systems improve personalization and context carry-over, they still blur the line between evidence and inference, struggle to organize information over long horizons, and offer limited support for agents that must explain their reasoning. We present Hindsight, a memory architecture that treats agent memory as a structured, first-class substrate for reasoning by organizing it into four logical networks that distinguish world facts, agent experiences, synthesized entity summaries, and evolving beliefs. This framework supports three core operations -- retain, recall, and reflect -- that govern how information is added, accessed, and updated. Under this abstraction, a temporal, entity aware memory layer incrementally turns conversational streams into a structured, queryable memory bank, while a reflection layer reasons over this bank to produce answers and to update information in a traceable way. On key long-horizon conversational memory benchmarks like LongMemEval and LoCoMo, Hindsight with an open-source 20B model lifts overall accuracy from 39% to 83.6% over a full-context baseline with the same backbone and outperforms full context GPT-4o. Scaling the backbone further pushes Hindsight to 91.4% on LongMemEval and up to 89.61% on LoCoMo (vs. 75.78% for the strongest prior open system), consistently outperforming existing memory architectures on multi-session and open-domain questions.

We present Voxtral Mini and Voxtral Small, two multimodal audio chat models. Voxtral is trained to comprehend both spoken audio and text documents, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of audio benchmarks, while preserving strong text capabilities. Voxtral Small outperforms a number of closed-source models, while being small enough to run locally. A 32K context window enables the model to handle audio files up to 40 minutes in duration and long multi-turn conversations. We also contribute three benchmarks for evaluating speech understanding models on knowledge and trivia. Both Voxtral models are released under Apache 2.0 license.

Memory systems are crucial to personalized LLMs by mitigating the context window limitation in capturing long-term user-LLM conversations. Typically, such systems leverage multiple agents to handle multi-granular memory construction and personalized memory retrieval tasks. To optimize the system, existing methods focus on specializing agents on their local tasks independently via prompt engineering or fine-tuning. However, they overlook cross-agent collaboration, where independent optimization on local agents hardly guarantees the global system performance. To address this issue, we propose a Collaborative Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Agent Memory Systems (CoMAM), jointly optimizing local agents to facilitate collaboration. Specifically, we regularize agents' execution as a sequential Markov decision process (MDP) to embed inter-agent dependencies into the state transition, yielding both local task rewards (e.g., information coverage for memory construction) and global rewards (i.e., query-answer accuracy). Then, we quantify each agent's contribution via group-level ranking consistency between local and global rewards, treating them as adaptive weights to assign global credit and integrate local-global rewards. Each agent is optimized by these integrated rewards, aligning local improvements with the global performance. Experiments show CoMAM outperforms leading memory systems, validating the efficacy of our proposed collaborative reinforcement learning for joint optimization.

This report presents VibeVoice, a novel model designed to synthesize long-form speech with multiple speakers by employing next-token diffusion, which is a unified method for modeling continuous data by autoregressively generating latent vectors via diffusion. To enable this, we introduce a novel continuous speech tokenizer that, when compared to the popular Encodec model, improves data compression by 80 times while maintaining comparable performance. The tokenizer effectively preserves audio fidelity while significantly boosting computational efficiency for processing long sequences. Thus, VibeVoice can synthesize long-form speech for up to 90 minutes (in a 64K context window length) with a maximum of 4 speakers, capturing the authentic conversational ``vibe'' and surpassing open-source and proprietary dialogue models.

Conversational AI has now reached billions of users, yet existing datasets capture only what people say, not what they think. We introduce ThoughtTrace, the first large-scale dataset that pairs real-world multi-turn human--AI conversations with users' self-reported thoughts: their reasons for sending prompts and reactions to assistant responses. ThoughtTrace comprises 1,058 users, 2,155 conversations, 17,058 turns, and 10,174 thought annotations collected across 20 language models. Our analysis shows that ThoughtTrace captures long-horizon, topically diverse interactions, and that thoughts are semantically distinct from messages, difficult for frontier LLMs to infer from context, diverse in content, and tied to conversation stages. We further demonstrate the utility of thoughts for downstream modeling. First, thoughts improve user-behavior prediction as inference-time context. Second, thought-guided rewrites provide fine-grained alignment signals for training personalized assistants. Together, ThoughtTrace establishes user thoughts as a new data modality for studying the cognitive dynamics behind human--AI interaction and provides a foundation for building assistants that better understand and adapt to users' latent goals, preferences, and needs.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in visual-language reasoning, but their ability to efficiently handle long videos remains limited. Despite recent advances in long-context MLLMs, storing and attending to the key-value (KV) cache for long visual contexts incurs substantial memory and computational overhead. Existing visual compression methods require either encoding the entire visual context before compression or having access to the questions in advance, which is impractical for long video understanding and multi-turn conversational settings. In this work, we propose StreamMem, a query-agnostic KV cache memory mechanism for streaming video understanding. Specifically, StreamMem encodes new video frames in a streaming manner, compressing the KV cache using attention scores between visual tokens and generic query tokens, while maintaining a fixed-size KV memory to enable efficient question answering (QA) in memory-constrained, long-video scenarios. Evaluation on three long video understanding and two streaming video question answering benchmarks shows that StreamMem achieves state-of-the-art performance in query-agnostic KV cache compression and is competitive with query-aware compression approaches.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI, but are constrained by limited context windows, hindering their utility in tasks like extended conversations and document analysis. To enable using context beyond limited context windows, we propose virtual context management, a technique drawing inspiration from hierarchical memory systems in traditional operating systems that provide the appearance of large memory resources through data movement between fast and slow memory. Using this technique, we introduce MemGPT (Memory-GPT), a system that intelligently manages different memory tiers in order to effectively provide extended context within the LLM's limited context window, and utilizes interrupts to manage control flow between itself and the user. We evaluate our OS-inspired design in two domains where the limited context windows of modern LLMs severely handicaps their performance: document analysis, where MemGPT is able to analyze large documents that far exceed the underlying LLM's context window, and multi-session chat, where MemGPT can create conversational agents that remember, reflect, and evolve dynamically through long-term interactions with their users. We release MemGPT code and data for our experiments at https://memgpt.ai.

Large language model (LLM) agents struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their inherent statelessness, requiring all task-relevant information to be encoded in growing input contexts. The resulting degraded reasoning quality, increased inference cost, and higher latency necessitate efficient working memory mechanisms. However, existing approaches either rely on lossy compression or similarity-based retrieval, which often fail to capture temporal structure and causal dependencies required for multi-step agentic tasks. In this work, we present HORMA, a Hierarchical Organize-and-Retrieve Memory Agent that organizes experience into a file-system-like hierarchical structure, where summarized entities are linked to the corresponding raw trajectories, enabling efficient access without losing detailed information. HORMA decomposes working memory into two stages: structured memory construction and navigation-based retrieval. The construction module iteratively refines how experiences are structured by distinguishing between failures caused by missing information and those caused by misleading or overloaded context. The navigation module retrieves task-relevant context by traversing the hierarchy using a lightweight agent trained with reinforcement learning to select minimal yet sufficient context, thereby reducing latency along the critical execution path. Across ALFWorld, LoCoMo, and LongMemEval, HORMA improves task performance under constrained context budgets while requiring at most 22.17% of the baseline token usage in long conversation tasks. Compared to existing methods, it consistently achieves better efficiency-performance trade-offs and generalizes effectively to unseen tasks.

We introduce the Granite Embedding R2 models, a comprehensive family of high-performance English encoder-based embedding models engineered for enterprise-scale dense retrieval applications. Building upon our first-generation release, these models deliver substantial improvements, including 16x expanded context length (8,192 tokens), state-of-the-art performance across diverse retrieval domains - text, code, long-document search, multi-turn conversational, and tabular data - and measurable speed advantages of 19-44\% over leading competitors while maintaining superior accuracy. Our release encompasses both bi-encoder and cross-encoder architectures, featuring a highly effective 22-layer retriever model and its efficient 12-layer counterpart, alongside a high-quality reranker model, all trained exclusively on enterprise-appropriate data with comprehensive governance oversight. The models demonstrate exceptional versatility across standard benchmarks, IBM-developed evaluation suites, and real-world enterprise use cases, establishing new performance standards for open-source embedding models. In an era where retrieval speed and accuracy are paramount for competitive advantage, the Granite R2 models deliver a compelling combination of cutting-edge performance, enterprise-ready licensing, and transparent data provenance that organizations require for mission-critical deployments. All models are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite, enabling unrestricted research and commercial use.

Medical audio data is difficult to collect due to privacy regulations and high annotation costs arising from domain expertise. Thus, existing benchmarks tend to underrepresent complex medical audio scenarios. To address this challenge, we present MedMosaic, a medical audio question-answering dataset designed to benchmark language and audio reasoning models under realistic clinical constraints. MedMosaic features a diverse range of medical audio types, including condition-related physiological sounds, carefully constructed synthetic voices to mimic speech with artifacts as well as real short and long length clinical conversations to model varying context lengths. The dataset also features a total of 46,701 question-answer pairs, spanning categories such as multiple-choice, sequential multi-turn, and open-ended question-answers, enabling systematic evaluation of multi-hop reasoning and answer generation capabilities. Benchmarking 13 audio and multimodal reasoning models reveals that reasoning remains challenging for all evaluated systems, with substantial performance variation across question types. In particular, even state-of-the-art model like Gemini-2.5-pro can only achieve 68.1% accuracy approximately. These findings underscore persistent limitations in medical reasoning and highlight the need for more robust, domain-specific multimodal reasoning models. A sample of benchmark data is available here: https://shorturl.at/Lyp33

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating coherent text within a single prompt but fall short in sustaining relevance, personalization, and continuity across extended interactions. Human communication, however, relies on multiple forms of memory, from recalling past conversations to adapting to personal traits and situational context. This paper introduces the Mixed Memory-Augmented Generation (MMAG) pattern, a framework that organizes memory for LLM-based agents into five interacting layers: conversational, long-term user, episodic and event-linked, sensory and context-aware, and short-term working memory. Drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology, we map these layers to technical components and outline strategies for coordination, prioritization, and conflict resolution. We demonstrate the approach through its implementation in the Heero conversational agent, where encrypted long-term bios and conversational history already improve engagement and retention. We further discuss implementation concerns around storage, retrieval, privacy, and latency, and highlight open challenges. MMAG provides a foundation for building memory-rich language agents that are more coherent, proactive, and aligned with human needs.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents necessitates the management of extensive, dynamic contexts. Current benchmarks, however, remain largely static, relying on passive retrieval tasks that fail to simulate the complexities of agent-environment interaction, such as non-linear reasoning and iterative feedback. To address this, we introduce AgentLongBench, which evaluates agents through simulated environment rollouts based on Lateral Thinking Puzzles. This framework generates rigorous interaction trajectories across knowledge-intensive and knowledge-free scenarios. Experiments with state-of-the-art models and memory systems (32K to 4M tokens) expose a critical weakness: while adept at static retrieval, agents struggle with the dynamic information synthesis essential for workflows. Our analysis indicates that this degradation is driven by the minimum number of tokens required to resolve a query. This factor explains why the high information density inherent in massive tool responses poses a significantly greater challenge than the memory fragmentation typical of long-turn dialogues.

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context", defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

Long context is an important topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP), running through the development of NLP architectures, and offers immense opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) giving LLMs the lifelong learning potential akin to humans. Unfortunately, the pursuit of a long context is accompanied by numerous obstacles. Nevertheless, long context remains a core competitive advantage for LLMs. In the past two years, the context length of LLMs has achieved a breakthrough extension to millions of tokens. Moreover, the research on long-context LLMs has expanded from length extrapolation to a comprehensive focus on architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation technologies. Inspired by the symphonic poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, we draw an analogy between the journey of extending the context of LLM and the attempts of humans to transcend its mortality. In this survey, We will illustrate how LLM struggles between the tremendous need for a longer context and its equal need to accept the fact that it is ultimately finite. To achieve this, we give a global picture of the lifecycle of long-context LLMs from four perspectives: architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation, showcasing the full spectrum of long-context technologies. At the end of this survey, we will present 10 unanswered questions currently faced by long-context LLMs. We hope this survey can serve as a systematic introduction to the research on long-context LLMs.

Although LLMs continue to iterate and improve, most open-source models still have a context window of no more than 4k, limiting their ability to handle long-context problems. Most existing open-source models for long-context chat still lack satisfactory accuracy. To address this issue, I approach it from the perspective of training data and theoretically prove that training the capability to handle long contexts requires "effective" rather than "long" data. Based on this, I propose using the "original text paraphrase" task, and successfully extend the context window of the existing model to 32k by a low-cost and effective method, achieving extremely high accuracy in multi-document-QA and surpassing all existing open-source models of the same scale. The model and training data have been open-sourced on HuggingFace and WiseModel.

The long-standing one-to-many issue of the open-domain dialogues poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation methods, i.e., there may be multiple suitable responses which differ in semantics for a given conversational context. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel learning-based automatic evaluation metric (CMN), which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs) with a Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) objective and employing Mutual Information (MI) to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. Experimental results on two open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with a wide range of baselines, especially in handling responses which are distant to the golden reference responses in semantics.

Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

Dialogue is an essential part of human communication and cooperation. Existing research mainly focuses on short dialogue scenarios in a one-on-one fashion. However, multi-person interactions in the real world, such as meetings or interviews, are frequently over a few thousand words. There is still a lack of corresponding research and powerful tools to understand and process such long dialogues. Therefore, in this work, we present a pre-training framework for long dialogue understanding and summarization. Considering the nature of long conversations, we propose a window-based denoising approach for generative pre-training. For a dialogue, it corrupts a window of text with dialogue-inspired noise, and guides the model to reconstruct this window based on the content of the remaining conversation. Furthermore, to process longer input, we augment the model with sparse attention which is combined with conventional attention in a hybrid manner. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets of long dialogues, covering tasks of dialogue summarization, abstractive question answering and topic segmentation. Experimentally, we show that our pre-trained model DialogLM significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art models across datasets and tasks. Source code and all the pre-trained models are available on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/microsoft/DialogLM).

We introduce LongSkywork, a long-context Large Language Model (LLM) capable of processing up to 200,000 tokens. We provide a training recipe for efficiently extending context length of LLMs. We identify that the critical element in enhancing long-context processing capability is to incorporate a long-context SFT stage following the standard SFT stage. A mere 200 iterations can convert the standard SFT model into a long-context model. To reduce the effort in collecting and annotating data for long-context language modeling, we develop two novel methods for creating synthetic data. These methods are applied during the continual pretraining phase as well as the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase, greatly enhancing the training efficiency of our long-context LLMs. Our findings suggest that synthetic long-context SFT data can surpass the performance of data curated by humans to some extent. LongSkywork achieves outstanding performance on a variety of long-context benchmarks. In the Needle test, a benchmark for long-context information retrieval, our models achieved perfect accuracy across multiple context spans. Moreover, in realistic application scenarios, LongSkywork-13B demonstrates performance on par with Claude2.1, the leading long-context model, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

While recent language models have the ability to take long contexts as input, relatively little is known about how well the language models use longer context. We analyze language model performance on two tasks that require identifying relevant information within their input contexts: multi-document question answering and key-value retrieval. We find that performance is often highest when relevant information occurs at the beginning or end of the input context, and significantly degrades when models must access relevant information in the middle of long contexts. Furthermore, performance substantially decreases as the input context grows longer, even for explicitly long-context models. Our analysis provides a better understanding of how language models use their input context and provides new evaluation protocols for future long-context models.

Current long-context benchmarks primarily focus on retrieval-based tests, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to locate specific information within extensive input contexts, such as the needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) benchmark. Long-context generation refers to the ability of a language model to generate coherent and contextually accurate text that spans across lengthy passages or documents. While recent studies show strong performance on NIAH and other retrieval-based long-context benchmarks, there is a significant lack of benchmarks for evaluating long-context generation capabilities. To bridge this gap and offer a comprehensive assessment, we introduce a synthetic benchmark, LongGenBench, which allows for flexible configurations of customized generation context lengths. LongGenBench advances beyond traditional benchmarks by redesigning the format of questions and necessitating that LLMs respond with a single, cohesive long-context answer. Upon extensive evaluation using LongGenBench, we observe that: (1) both API accessed and open source models exhibit performance degradation in long-context generation scenarios, ranging from 1.2% to 47.1%; (2) different series of LLMs exhibit varying trends of performance degradation, with the Gemini-1.5-Flash model showing the least degradation among API accessed models, and the Qwen2 series exhibiting the least degradation in LongGenBench among open source models.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capacity to process long contexts. However, effectively utilizing this long context remains a challenge due to the issue of distraction, where irrelevant information dominates lengthy contexts, causing LLMs to lose focus on the most relevant segments. To address this, we propose a novel training method that enhances LLMs' ability to discern relevant information through a unique combination of retrieval-based data augmentation and contrastive learning. Specifically, during fine-tuning with long contexts, we employ a retriever to extract the most relevant segments, serving as augmented inputs. We then introduce an auxiliary contrastive learning objective to explicitly ensure that outputs from the original context and the retrieved sub-context are closely aligned. Extensive experiments on long single-document and multi-document QA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.

Large language models have an exceptional capability to incorporate new information in a contextual manner. However, the full potential of such an approach is often restrained due to a limitation in the effective context length. One solution to this issue is to endow an attention layer with access to an external memory, which comprises of (key, value) pairs. Yet, as the number of documents increases, the proportion of relevant keys to irrelevant ones decreases, leading the model to focus more on the irrelevant keys. We identify a significant challenge, dubbed the distraction issue, where keys linked to different semantic values might overlap, making them hard to distinguish. To tackle this problem, we introduce the Focused Transformer (FoT), a technique that employs a training process inspired by contrastive learning. This novel approach enhances the structure of the (key, value) space, enabling an extension of the context length. Our method allows for fine-tuning pre-existing, large-scale models to lengthen their effective context. This is demonstrated by our fine-tuning of 3B and 7B OpenLLaMA checkpoints. The resulting models, which we name LongLLaMA, exhibit advancements in tasks requiring a long context. We further illustrate that our LongLLaMA models adeptly manage a 256 k context length for passkey retrieval.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a notable breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP), contributing to substantial progress in both text comprehension and generation. However, amidst these advancements, it is noteworthy that LLMs often face a limitation in terms of context length extrapolation. Understanding and extending the context length for LLMs is crucial in enhancing their performance across various NLP applications. In this survey paper, we delve into the multifaceted aspects of exploring why it is essential, and the potential transformations that superior techniques could bring to NLP applications. We study the inherent challenges associated with extending context length and present an organized overview of the existing strategies employed by researchers. Additionally, we discuss the intricacies of evaluating context extension techniques and highlight the open challenges that researchers face in this domain. Furthermore, we explore whether there is a consensus within the research community regarding evaluation standards and identify areas where further agreement is needed. This comprehensive survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, guiding them through the nuances of context length extension techniques and fostering discussions on future advancements in this evolving field.

Processing and reasoning over long contexts is crucial for many practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as document comprehension and agent construction. Despite recent strides in making LLMs process contexts with more than 100K tokens, there is currently a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate this long-context capability. Existing public benchmarks typically focus on contexts around 10K tokens, limiting the assessment and comparison of LLMs in processing longer contexts. In this paper, we propose inftyBench, the first LLM benchmark featuring an average data length surpassing 100K tokens. inftyBench comprises synthetic and realistic tasks spanning diverse domains, presented in both English and Chinese. The tasks in inftyBench are designed to require well understanding of long dependencies in contexts, and make simply retrieving a limited number of passages from contexts not sufficient for these tasks. In our experiments, based on inftyBench, we evaluate the state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LLMs tailored for processing long contexts. The results indicate that existing long context LLMs still require significant advancements to effectively process 100K+ context. We further present three intriguing analyses regarding the behavior of LLMs processing long context.

Long context capability is a crucial competency for large language models (LLMs) as it mitigates the human struggle to digest long-form texts. This capability enables complex task-solving scenarios such as book summarization, code assistance, and many more tasks that are traditionally manpower-intensive. However, transformer-based LLMs face significant challenges with long context input due to the growing size of the KV cache and the intrinsic complexity of attending to extended inputs; where multiple schools of efficiency-driven approaches -- such as KV cache quantization, token dropping, prompt compression, linear-time sequence models, and hybrid architectures -- have been proposed to produce efficient yet long context-capable models. Despite these advancements, no existing work has comprehensively benchmarked these methods in a reasonably aligned environment. In this work, we fill this gap by providing a taxonomy of current methods and evaluating 10+ state-of-the-art approaches across seven categories of long context tasks. Our work reveals numerous previously unknown phenomena and offers insights -- as well as a friendly workbench -- for the future development of long context-capable LLMs. The source code will be available at https://github.com/henryzhongsc/longctx_bench

As the context limits of Large Language Models (LLMs) increase, the range of possible applications and downstream functions broadens. In many real-world tasks, decisions depend on details scattered across collections of often disparate documents containing mostly irrelevant information. Long-context LLMs appear well-suited to this form of complex information retrieval and reasoning, which has traditionally proven costly and time-consuming. However, although the development of longer context models has seen rapid gains in recent years, our understanding of how effectively LLMs use their context has not kept pace. To address this, we conduct a set of retrieval experiments designed to evaluate the capabilities of 17 leading LLMs, such as their ability to follow threads of information through the context window. Strikingly, we find that many models are remarkably threadsafe: capable of simultaneously following multiple threads without significant loss in performance. Still, for many models, we find the effective context limit is significantly shorter than the supported context length, with accuracy decreasing as the context window grows. Our study also highlights the important point that token counts from different tokenizers should not be directly compared -- they often correspond to substantially different numbers of written characters. We release our code and long-context experimental data.

Knowing how to end and resume conversations over time is a natural part of communication, allowing for discussions to span weeks, months, or years. The duration of gaps between conversations dictates which topics are relevant and which questions to ask, and dialogue systems which do not explicitly model time may generate responses that are unnatural. In this work we explore the idea of making dialogue models aware of time, and present GapChat, a multi-session dialogue dataset in which the time between each session varies. While the dataset is constructed in real-time, progress on events in speakers' lives is simulated in order to create realistic dialogues occurring across a long timespan. We expose time information to the model and compare different representations of time and event progress. In human evaluation we show that time-aware models perform better in metrics that judge the relevance of the chosen topics and the information gained from the conversation.

Long-context large language models (LC LLMs) promise to increase reliability of LLMs in real-world tasks requiring processing and understanding of long input documents. However, this ability of LC LLMs to reliably utilize their growing context windows remains under investigation. In this work, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art GPT-4 suite of LC LLMs in solving a series of progressively challenging tasks, as a function of factors such as context length, task difficulty, and position of key information by creating a real world financial news dataset. Our findings indicate that LC LLMs exhibit brittleness at longer context lengths even for simple tasks, with performance deteriorating sharply as task complexity increases. At longer context lengths, these state-of-the-art models experience catastrophic failures in instruction following resulting in degenerate outputs. Our prompt ablations also reveal unfortunate continued sensitivity to both the placement of the task instruction in the context window as well as minor markdown formatting. Finally, we advocate for more rigorous evaluation of LC LLMs by employing holistic metrics such as F1 (rather than recall) and reporting confidence intervals, thereby ensuring robust and conclusive findings.

Long-context processing has become increasingly important for large language models (LLMs), but simply extending the context window does not guarantee effective utilization of long inputs. As input length grows, accuracy often degrades, indicating that models still struggle to identify and use the evidence most relevant to a question. A promising way to improve long-context utilization is test-time training (TTT), which treats the test context as a training example for instance-specific parameter adaptation. However, applying TTT to the entire long context is prohibitively expensive, while adapting on randomly sampled spans introduces severe noise. Because most spans in a long context are irrelevant to the specific question, training on them may even degrade the base model's performance. Our preliminary study shows that TTT is highly sensitive to training-span quality: on LongBench-v2, TTT on randomly sampled spans hurts performance, whereas TTT on oracle spans substantially improves it. Motivated by this, we propose a simple method, Self-Guided TTT (S-TTT): before adaptation, the model identifies the evidence spans it should learn from, and the standard language-modeling training objective is applied only to those selected spans. On two challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, LongBench-v2 and LongBench-Pro, S-TTT improves accuracy for both Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, achieving up to a 15% relative improvement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in multi-turn conversational tasks, yet their pre-training data predominantly consists of continuous prose, creating a potential mismatch between required capabilities and training paradigms. We introduce a novel approach to address this discrepancy by synthesizing conversational data from existing text corpora. We present a pipeline that transforms a cluster of multiple related documents into an extended multi-turn, multi-topic information-seeking dialogue. Applying our pipeline to Wikipedia articles, we curate DocTalk, a multi-turn pre-training dialogue corpus consisting of over 730k long conversations. We hypothesize that exposure to such synthesized conversational structures during pre-training can enhance the fundamental multi-turn capabilities of LLMs, such as context memory and understanding. Empirically, we show that incorporating DocTalk during pre-training results in up to 40% gain in context memory and understanding, without compromising base performance. DocTalk is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AmazonScience/DocTalk.

Long-context modeling has drawn more and more attention in the area of Large Language Models (LLMs). Continual training with long-context data becomes the de-facto method to equip LLMs with the ability to process long inputs. However, it still remains an open challenge to measure the quality of long-context training data. To address this issue, we propose a Long-context data selection framework with Attention-based Dependency Measurement (LADM), which can efficiently identify high-quality long-context data from a large-scale, multi-domain pre-training corpus. LADM leverages the retrieval capabilities of the attention mechanism to capture contextual dependencies, ensuring a comprehensive quality measurement of long-context data. Experimental results show that our LADM framework significantly boosts the performance of LLMs on multiple long-context tasks with only 1B tokens for continual training.

Long-context large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements, driven by techniques like Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) (Su et al., 2023) and its extensions (Chen et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2024c; Peng et al., 2023). By adjusting RoPE parameters and incorporating training data with extended contexts, we can train performant models with considerably longer input sequences. However, existing RoPE-based methods exhibit performance limitations when applied to extended context lengths. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various attention mechanisms, including RoPE, No Positional Embedding (NoPE), and Query-Key Normalization (QK-Norm), identifying their strengths and shortcomings in long-context modeling. Our investigation identifies distinctive attention patterns in these methods and highlights their impact on long-context performance, providing valuable insights for architectural design. Building on these findings, we propose a novel architectural based on a hybrid attention mechanism that not only surpasses conventional RoPE-based transformer models in long context tasks but also achieves competitive performance on benchmarks requiring shorter context lengths.

Voice anonymization techniques have been found to successfully obscure a speaker's acoustic identity in short, isolated utterances in benchmarks such as the VoicePrivacy Challenge. In practice, however, utterances seldom occur in isolation: long-form audio is commonplace in domains such as interviews, phone calls, and meetings. In these cases, many utterances from the same speaker are available, which pose a significantly greater privacy risk: given multiple utterances from the same speaker, an attacker could exploit an individual's vocabulary, syntax, and turns of phrase to re-identify them, even when their voice is completely disguised. To address this risk, we propose a new approach that performs a contextual rewriting of the transcripts in an ASR-TTS pipeline to eliminate speaker-specific style while preserving meaning. We present results in a long-form telephone conversation setting demonstrating the effectiveness of a content-based attack on voice-anonymized speech. Then we show how the proposed content-based anonymization methods can mitigate this risk while preserving speech utility. Overall, we find that paraphrasing is an effective defense against content-based attacks and recommend that stakeholders adopt this step to ensure anonymity in long-form audio.

Long-term conversational memory requires retrieving evidence scattered across multiple sessions, yet single-pass retrieval fails on temporal and multi-hop questions. Existing iterative methods refine queries via generated content or document-level signals, but none explicitly diagnoses the evidence gap, namely what is missing from the accumulated retrieval set, leaving query refinement untargeted. We present EviMem, combining IRIS (Iterative Retrieval via Insufficiency Signals), a closed-loop framework that detects evidence gaps through sufficiency evaluation, diagnoses what is missing, and drives targeted query refinement, with LaceMem (Layered Architecture for Conversational Evidence Memory), a coarse-to-fine memory hierarchy supporting fine-grained gap diagnosis. On LoCoMo, EviMem improves Judge Accuracy over MIRIX on temporal (73.3% to 81.6%) and multi-hop (65.9% to 85.2%) questions at 4.5x lower latency. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EviMem.

Long-term memory is a critical capability for multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents, particularly in conversational settings where information accumulates and evolves over time. However, existing benchmarks either evaluate multi-session memory in text-only conversations or assess multimodal understanding within localized contexts, failing to evaluate how multimodal memory is preserved, organized, and evolved across long-term conversational trajectories. Thus, we introduce Mem-Gallery, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal long-term conversational memory in MLLM agents. Mem-Gallery features high-quality multi-session conversations grounded in both visual and textual information, with long interaction horizons and rich multimodal dependencies. Building on this dataset, we propose a systematic evaluation framework that assesses key memory capabilities along three functional dimensions: memory extraction and test-time adaptation, memory reasoning, and memory knowledge management. Extensive benchmarking across thirteen memory systems reveals several key findings, highlighting the necessity of explicit multimodal information retention and memory organization, the persistent limitations in memory reasoning and knowledge management, as well as the efficiency bottleneck of current models.

Scaling language models to longer contexts is essential for capturing rich dependencies across extended discourse. However, naïve context extension imposes significant computational and memory burdens, often resulting in inefficiencies during both training and inference. In this work, we propose CCF, a novel context compression framework designed to enable efficient long-context modeling by learning hierarchical latent representations that preserve global semantics while aggressively reducing input redundancy. CCF integrates segment-wise semantic aggregation with key-value memory encoding, forming compact representations that support accurate reconstruction and long-range understanding. To further enhance scalability, we introduce a training-efficient optimization strategy that couples incremental segment decoding with sparse reservoir sampling, substantially reducing memory overhead without degrading performance. Empirical results on multiple long-context language modeling benchmarks demonstrate that CCF achieves competitive perplexity under high compression ratios, and significantly improves throughput and memory efficiency compared to existing approaches. These findings highlight the potential of structured compression for scalable and effective long-context language modeling.

Broad textual understanding and in-context learning require language models that utilize full document contexts. Due to the implementation challenges associated with directly training long-context models, many methods have been proposed for extending models to handle long contexts. However, owing to differences in data and model classes, it has been challenging to compare these approaches, leading to uncertainty as to how to evaluate long-context performance and whether it differs from standard evaluation. We implement a controlled protocol for extension methods with a standardized evaluation, utilizing consistent base models and extension data. Our study yields several insights into long-context behavior. First, we reaffirm the critical role of perplexity as a general-purpose performance indicator even in longer-context tasks. Second, we find that current approximate attention methods systematically underperform across long-context tasks. Finally, we confirm that exact fine-tuning based methods are generally effective within the range of their extension, whereas extrapolation remains challenging. All codebases, models, and checkpoints will be made available open-source, promoting transparency and facilitating further research in this critical area of AI development.

Large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance in various language tasks, are typically limited to processing texts within context-window size. This limitation has spurred significant research efforts to enhance LLMs' long-context understanding with high-quality long-sequence benchmarks. However, prior datasets in this regard suffer from shortcomings, such as short context length compared to the context window of modern LLMs; outdated documents that have data leakage problems; and an emphasis on short dependency tasks rather than long dependency tasks. In this paper, we present LooGLE, a Long Context Generic Language Evaluation benchmark for LLMs' long context understanding. LooGLE features relatively new documents post-2022, with over 24,000 tokens per document and 6,000 newly generated questions spanning diverse domains. Human annotators meticulously crafted more than 1,100 high-quality question-answer pairs to meet the long dependency requirements. These pairs underwent thorough cross-validation, yielding the most precise assessment of LLMs' long dependency capabilities. The evaluation of eight state-of-the-art LLMs on LooGLE revealed key findings: (i) commercial models outperformed open-sourced models; (ii) LLMs excelled in short dependency tasks like short question-answering and cloze tasks but struggled with more intricate long dependency tasks; (iii) in-context learning and chaining thoughts offered only marginal improvements; (iv) retrieval-based techniques demonstrated substantial benefits for short question-answering, while strategies for extending context window length had limited impact on long context understanding. As such, LooGLE not only provides a systematic and comprehensive evaluation schema on long-context LLMs, but also sheds light on future development of enhanced models towards "true long-context understanding".

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in scaling to access massive contexts. However, the access is via the latent and uninterpretable attention mechanisms, and LLMs fail to effective process long context, exhibiting significant performance degradation as context length increases. In this work, we study whether long-context processing can be externalized from latent attention into explicit, executable interactions, by allowing coding agents to organize text in file systems and manipulate it using its native tools. We evaluate off-the-shelf frontier coding agents as the general interface for tasks that require processing long contexts, including long-context reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, and open-domain question answering with large-scale corpus contains up to three trillion tokens. Across multiple benchmarks, these agents outperform published state-of-the-art by 17.3% on average. We attribute this efficacy to two key factors: native tool proficiency, which enables agents to leverage executable code and terminal commands rather than passive semantic queries, and file system familiarity, which allows them to navigate massive text corpora as directory structures. These findings suggest that delegating long-context processing to coding agents offers an effective alternative to semantic search or context window scaling, opening new directions for long-context processing in LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in understanding language and executing complex reasoning tasks. However, LLMs with long context windows have been notorious for their expensive training costs and high inference latency. Even the most advanced models such as GPT-4 and Claude2 often make mistakes when processing inputs of over 100k tokens, a phenomenon also known as lost in the middle. In this paper, we propose LongAgent, a method based on multi-agent collaboration, which scales LLMs (e.g., LLaMA) to a context of 128K and demonstrates potential superiority in long-text processing compared to GPT-4. In LongAgent, a leader is responsible for understanding user intent and directing team members to acquire information from documents. Due to members' hallucinations, it is non-trivial for a leader to obtain accurate information from the responses of dozens to hundreds of members. To address this, we develop an inter-member communication mechanism to resolve response conflicts caused by hallucinations through information sharing. Our experimental results indicate that LongAgent offers a promising alternative for long-text processing. The agent team instantiated with LLaMA-7B achieves significant improvements in tasks such as 128k-long text retrieval, multi-hop question answering, compared to GPT-4.

Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) in various applications. However, directly training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient to enhance this capability since some training samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts. In this study, we propose a data mining framework ProLong that can assign each training sample with a long dependency score, which can be used to rank and filter samples that are more advantageous for enhancing long-context modeling abilities in LLM training. Specifically, we first use delta perplexity scores to measure the Dependency Strength between text segments in a given document. Then we refine this metric based on the Dependency Distance of these segments to incorporate spatial relationships across long-contexts. Final results are calibrated with a Dependency Specificity metric to prevent trivial dependencies introduced by repetitive patterns. Moreover, a random sampling approach is proposed to optimize the computational efficiency of ProLong. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks indicate that ProLong effectively identifies documents that carry long dependencies and LLMs trained on these documents exhibit significantly enhanced long-context modeling capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative era in the field of natural language processing, excelling in tasks related to text comprehension and generation. Nevertheless, they encounter difficulties when confronted with chaotic contexts (e.g., distractors rather than long irrelevant context), leading to the inadvertent omission of certain details within the chaotic context. In response to these challenges, we introduce the "Thread of Thought" (ThoT) strategy, which draws inspiration from human cognitive processes. ThoT systematically segments and analyzes extended contexts while adeptly selecting pertinent information. This strategy serves as a versatile "plug-and-play" module, seamlessly integrating with various LLMs and prompting techniques. In the experiments, we utilize the PopQA and EntityQ datasets, as well as a Multi-Turn Conversation Response dataset (MTCR) we collected, to illustrate that ThoT significantly improves reasoning performance compared to other prompting techniques.