Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces

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Main Authors: Rajesh, Shreyas, Holur, Pavan, Duan, Chenda, Chong, David, Roychowdhury, Vwani
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rajesh, Shreyas
Holur, Pavan
Duan, Chenda
Chong, David
Roychowdhury, Vwani
author_facet Rajesh, Shreyas
Holur, Pavan
Duan, Chenda
Chong, David
Roychowdhury, Vwani
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in long-context reasoning: many documents exceed their finite context windows, while performance on texts that do fit degrades with sequence length, necessitating their augmentation with external memory frameworks. Current solutions, which have evolved from retrieval using semantic embeddings to more sophisticated structured knowledge graphs representations for improved sense-making and associativity, are tailored for fact-based retrieval and fail to build the space-time-anchored narrative representations required for tracking entities through episodic events. To bridge this gap, we propose the \textbf{Generative Semantic Workspace} (GSW), a neuro-inspired generative memory framework that builds structured, interpretable representations of evolving situations, enabling LLMs to reason over evolving roles, actions, and spatiotemporal contexts. Our framework comprises an \textit{Operator}, which maps incoming observations to intermediate semantic structures, and a \textit{Reconciler}, which integrates these into a persistent workspace that enforces temporal, spatial, and logical coherence. On the Episodic Memory Benchmark (EpBench) \cite{huet_episodic_2025} comprising corpora ranging from 100k to 1M tokens in length, GSW outperforms existing RAG based baselines by up to \textbf{20\%}. Furthermore, GSW is highly efficient, reducing query-time context tokens by \textbf{51\%} compared to the next most token-efficient baseline, reducing inference time costs considerably. More broadly, GSW offers a concrete blueprint for endowing LLMs with human-like episodic memory, paving the way for more capable agents that can reason over long horizons. Code is available at https://github.com/roychowdhuryresearch/gsw-memory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces
Rajesh, Shreyas
Holur, Pavan
Duan, Chenda
Chong, David
Roychowdhury, Vwani
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in long-context reasoning: many documents exceed their finite context windows, while performance on texts that do fit degrades with sequence length, necessitating their augmentation with external memory frameworks. Current solutions, which have evolved from retrieval using semantic embeddings to more sophisticated structured knowledge graphs representations for improved sense-making and associativity, are tailored for fact-based retrieval and fail to build the space-time-anchored narrative representations required for tracking entities through episodic events. To bridge this gap, we propose the \textbf{Generative Semantic Workspace} (GSW), a neuro-inspired generative memory framework that builds structured, interpretable representations of evolving situations, enabling LLMs to reason over evolving roles, actions, and spatiotemporal contexts. Our framework comprises an \textit{Operator}, which maps incoming observations to intermediate semantic structures, and a \textit{Reconciler}, which integrates these into a persistent workspace that enforces temporal, spatial, and logical coherence. On the Episodic Memory Benchmark (EpBench) \cite{huet_episodic_2025} comprising corpora ranging from 100k to 1M tokens in length, GSW outperforms existing RAG based baselines by up to \textbf{20\%}. Furthermore, GSW is highly efficient, reducing query-time context tokens by \textbf{51\%} compared to the next most token-efficient baseline, reducing inference time costs considerably. More broadly, GSW offers a concrete blueprint for endowing LLMs with human-like episodic memory, paving the way for more capable agents that can reason over long horizons. Code is available at https://github.com/roychowdhuryresearch/gsw-memory.
title Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07587