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Main Authors: Tan, Zhen, Yan, Jun, Hsu, I-Hung, Han, Rujun, Wang, Zifeng, Le, Long T., Song, Yiwen, Chen, Yanfei, Palangi, Hamid, Lee, George, Iyer, Anand, Chen, Tianlong, Liu, Huan, Lee, Chen-Yu, Pfister, Tomas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08026
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author Tan, Zhen
Yan, Jun
Hsu, I-Hung
Han, Rujun
Wang, Zifeng
Le, Long T.
Song, Yiwen
Chen, Yanfei
Palangi, Hamid
Lee, George
Iyer, Anand
Chen, Tianlong
Liu, Huan
Lee, Chen-Yu
Pfister, Tomas
author_facet Tan, Zhen
Yan, Jun
Hsu, I-Hung
Han, Rujun
Wang, Zifeng
Le, Long T.
Song, Yiwen
Chen, Yanfei
Palangi, Hamid
Lee, George
Iyer, Anand
Chen, Tianlong
Liu, Huan
Lee, Chen-Yu
Pfister, Tomas
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in open-ended dialogue, yet their inability to retain and retrieve relevant information from long-term interactions limits their effectiveness in applications requiring sustained personalization. External memory mechanisms have been proposed to address this limitation, enabling LLMs to maintain conversational continuity. However, existing approaches struggle with two key challenges. First, rigid memory granularity fails to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. Second, fixed retrieval mechanisms cannot adapt to diverse dialogue contexts and user interaction patterns. In this work, we propose Reflective Memory Management (RMM), a novel mechanism for long-term dialogue agents, integrating forward- and backward-looking reflections: (1) Prospective Reflection, which dynamically summarizes interactions across granularities-utterances, turns, and sessions-into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval, and (2) Retrospective Reflection, which iteratively refines the retrieval in an online reinforcement learning (RL) manner based on LLMs' cited evidence. Experiments show that RMM demonstrates consistent improvement across various metrics and benchmarks. For example, RMM shows more than 10% accuracy improvement over the baseline without memory management on the LongMemEval dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08026
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents
Tan, Zhen
Yan, Jun
Hsu, I-Hung
Han, Rujun
Wang, Zifeng
Le, Long T.
Song, Yiwen
Chen, Yanfei
Palangi, Hamid
Lee, George
Iyer, Anand
Chen, Tianlong
Liu, Huan
Lee, Chen-Yu
Pfister, Tomas
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in open-ended dialogue, yet their inability to retain and retrieve relevant information from long-term interactions limits their effectiveness in applications requiring sustained personalization. External memory mechanisms have been proposed to address this limitation, enabling LLMs to maintain conversational continuity. However, existing approaches struggle with two key challenges. First, rigid memory granularity fails to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. Second, fixed retrieval mechanisms cannot adapt to diverse dialogue contexts and user interaction patterns. In this work, we propose Reflective Memory Management (RMM), a novel mechanism for long-term dialogue agents, integrating forward- and backward-looking reflections: (1) Prospective Reflection, which dynamically summarizes interactions across granularities-utterances, turns, and sessions-into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval, and (2) Retrospective Reflection, which iteratively refines the retrieval in an online reinforcement learning (RL) manner based on LLMs' cited evidence. Experiments show that RMM demonstrates consistent improvement across various metrics and benchmarks. For example, RMM shows more than 10% accuracy improvement over the baseline without memory management on the LongMemEval dataset.
title In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08026