mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation

arXiv 2107.07567 ↗First posted 15 Jul 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 266

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 58 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent improvements in open-domain dialogue models, state of the art models are trained and evaluated on short conversations with little context. In contrast, the long-term conversation setting has hardly been studied. In this work we collect and release a human-human dataset consisting of multiple chat sessions whereby the speaking partners learn about each other's interests and discuss the things they have learnt from past sessions. We show how existing models trained on existing datasets perform poorly in this long-term conversation setting in both automatic and human evaluations, and we study long-context models that can perform much better. In particular, we find retrieval-augmented methods and methods with an ability to summarize and recall previous conversations outperform the standard encoder-decoder architectures currently considered state of the art.

Key facts. Cited by 266 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2021.

Builds on

32 of 40 references.

References · 32

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  2. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
  3. 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
  4. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,362
  5. 2017Billion-scale similarity search with GPUscited by 2,477
  6. 2020Reformer: The Efficient Transformercited by 1,658
  7. 2019Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformerscited by 1,523
  8. 2020Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 1,203
  9. 2018Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?cited by 820
  10. 2017Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questionscited by 777
  11. 2021Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversationcited by 691
  12. 2017DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Datasetcited by 649
20 more
  1. 2018MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversationscited by 636
  2. 2020Recipes for building an open-domain chatbotcited by 593
  3. 2018Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agentscited by 530
  4. 2019SAMSum Corpus: A Human-annotated Dialogue Dataset for Abstractive Summarizationcited by 530
  5. 2020Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbotcited by 467
  6. 2014Memory Networkscited by 354
  7. 2020The Pushshift Reddit Datasetcited by 289
  8. 2016A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Modelcited by 221
  9. 2019Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluationcited by 189
  10. 2020Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbotscited by 168
  11. 2019Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systemscited by 147
  12. 2018Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agentscited by 126
  13. 2019Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Gamecited by 122
  14. 2016Neural Summarization by Extracting Sentences and Wordscited by 114
  15. 2021Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Toolingcited by 77
  16. 2018Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Sentence-Gated Modeling Optimized by Dialogue Actscited by 44
  17. 2019BottleSum: Unsupervised and Self-supervised Sentence Summarization using the Information Bottleneck Principlecited by 39
  18. 2019Improving Neural Conversational Models with Entropy-Based Data Filteringcited by 30
  19. 2020The Gutenberg Dialogue Datasetcited by 8
  20. 2018Dial2Desc: End-to-end Dialogue Description Generationcited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 37; 2023: 49; 2024: 52; 2025: 40; 2026: 80.

266 papers.

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  2. 2022Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generationcited by 2,056
  3. 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,295
  4. 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 1,000
  5. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agentscited by 800
  6. 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 656
  7. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agentscited by 622
  8. 2023MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memorycited by 539
  9. 2024A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Modelscited by 450
  10. 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memorycited by 372
  11. 2023Personalized Soups: Personalized Large Language Model Alignment via Post-hoc Parameter Mergingcited by 271
  12. 2022OPT-IML: Scaling Language Model Instruction Meta Learning through the Lens of Generalizationcited by 235
38 more
  1. 2025Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learningcited by 220
  2. 2022BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engagecited by 197
  3. 2025Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agentscited by 190
  4. 2021Towards Continual Knowledge Learning of Language Modelscited by 172
  5. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systemscited by 170
  6. 2025Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scalecited by 163
  7. 2022"I'm sorry to hear that": Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Datasetcited by 160
  8. 2023Walking Down the Memory Maze: Beyond Context Limit through Interactive Readingcited by 129
  9. 2022Improving the Domain Adaptation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Models for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 126
  10. 2022Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modelingcited by 125
  11. 2024Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialoguecited by 121
  12. 2024Heterogeneous LoRA for Federated Fine-tuning of On-Device Foundation Modelscited by 114
  13. 2022Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memorycited by 107
  14. 2022Language Models that Seek for Knowledge: Modular Search & Generation for Dialogue and Prompt Completioncited by 102
  15. 2025In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agentscited by 102
  16. 2025On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agentscited by 101
  17. 2023MemoChat: Tuning LLMs to Use Memos for Consistent Long-Range Open-Domain Conversationcited by 94
  18. 2025Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmapcited by 78
  19. 2024From Isolated Conversations to Hierarchical Schemas: Dynamic Tree Memory Representation for LLMscited by 77
  20. 2023Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language modelscited by 72
  21. 2021Few-Shot Bot: Prompt-Based Learning for Dialogue Systemscited by 64
  22. 2023Think-in-Memory: Recalling and Post-thinking Enable LLMs with Long-Term Memorycited by 64
  23. 2023Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 63
  24. 2023A Multi-Task Embedder For Retrieval Augmented LLMscited by 63
  25. 2021DialFact: A Benchmark for Fact-Checking in Dialoguecited by 62
  26. 2022Human Evaluation of Conversations is an Open Problem: comparing the sensitivity of various methods for evaluating dialogue agentscited by 62
  27. 2022Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversationscited by 62
  28. 2023Recursively Summarizing Enables Long-Term Dialogue Memory in Large Language Modelscited by 62
  29. 2023Prompted LLMs as Chatbot Modules for Long Open-domain Conversationcited by 61
  30. 2025Evaluating LLM-based Agents for Multi-Turn Conversations: A Surveycited by 56
  31. 2024Towards Lifelong Dialogue Agents via Timeline-based Memory Managementcited by 50
  32. 2023Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversationscited by 47
  33. 2024LongGenBench: Benchmarking Long-Form Generation in Long Context LLMscited by 47
  34. 2023Faithful Persona-based Conversational Dataset Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 45
  35. 2024Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editingcited by 43
  36. 2025A Survey on Personalized Alignment -- The Missing Piece for Large Language Models in Real-World Applicationscited by 40
  37. 2022The CRINGE Loss: Learning what language not to modelcited by 39
  38. 2023Memory Sandbox: Transparent and Interactive Memory Management for Conversational Agentscited by 36

50 most cited of 266 All 266 (JSON)

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  1. 2025A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents
  2. 2026SpeakerMem-R1: Speaker-Centered Dual-Track Memory for Multi-Party Dialogue
  3. 2025Evaluating Long-Term Memory for Long-Context Question Answering
  4. 2025REALTALK: A 21-Day Real-World Dataset for Long-Term Conversation
  5. 2026Mem-Gallery: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Conversational Memory for MLLM Agents
  6. 2025Mnemosyne: An Unsupervised, Human-Inspired Long-Term Memory Architecture for Edge-Based LLMs
  7. 2025SGMem: Sentence Graph Memory for Long-Term Conversational Agents
  8. 2026PRAGMA: Evaluating Personalized Guidance with Memory Alignment in Lifelong Conversations