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Main Authors: Tian, Motong, Wong, Allen P., Mao, Mingjun, Zhou, Wangchunshu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14857
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author Tian, Motong
Wong, Allen P.
Mao, Mingjun
Zhou, Wangchunshu
author_facet Tian, Motong
Wong, Allen P.
Mao, Mingjun
Zhou, Wangchunshu
contents Memory-augmented language agents rely on embedding models for effective memory retrieval. However, existing training data construction overlooks a critical limitation: the hierarchical difficulty of negative samples and their natural distribution in human-agent interactions. In practice, some negatives are semantically close distractors while others are trivially irrelevant, and natural dialogue exhibits structured proportions of these types. Current approaches using synthetic or uniformly sampled negatives fail to reflect this diversity, limiting embedding models' ability to learn nuanced discrimination essential for robust memory retrieval. In this work, we propose a principled data construction framework HiNS that explicitly models negative sample difficulty tiers and incorporates empirically grounded negative ratios derived from conversational data, enabling the training of embedding models with substantially improved retrieval fidelity and generalization in memory-intensive tasks. Experiments show significant improvements: on LoCoMo, F1/BLEU-1 gains of 3.27%/3.30%(MemoryOS) and 1.95%/1.78% (Mem0); on PERSONAMEM, total score improvements of 1.19% (MemoryOS) and 2.55% (Mem0).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_14857
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HiNS: Hierarchical Negative Sampling for More Comprehensive Memory Retrieval Embedding Model
Tian, Motong
Wong, Allen P.
Mao, Mingjun
Zhou, Wangchunshu
Computation and Language
Memory-augmented language agents rely on embedding models for effective memory retrieval. However, existing training data construction overlooks a critical limitation: the hierarchical difficulty of negative samples and their natural distribution in human-agent interactions. In practice, some negatives are semantically close distractors while others are trivially irrelevant, and natural dialogue exhibits structured proportions of these types. Current approaches using synthetic or uniformly sampled negatives fail to reflect this diversity, limiting embedding models' ability to learn nuanced discrimination essential for robust memory retrieval. In this work, we propose a principled data construction framework HiNS that explicitly models negative sample difficulty tiers and incorporates empirically grounded negative ratios derived from conversational data, enabling the training of embedding models with substantially improved retrieval fidelity and generalization in memory-intensive tasks. Experiments show significant improvements: on LoCoMo, F1/BLEU-1 gains of 3.27%/3.30%(MemoryOS) and 1.95%/1.78% (Mem0); on PERSONAMEM, total score improvements of 1.19% (MemoryOS) and 2.55% (Mem0).
title HiNS: Hierarchical Negative Sampling for More Comprehensive Memory Retrieval Embedding Model
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14857