mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards Lifelong Dialogue Agents via Timeline-based Memory Management

arXiv 2406.10996 ↗First posted 16 Jun 2024cs.CLcited by 50

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems

Abstract (arXiv)

To achieve lifelong human-agent interaction, dialogue agents need to constantly memorize perceived information and properly retrieve it for response generation (RG). While prior studies focus on getting rid of outdated memories to improve retrieval quality, we argue that such memories provide rich, important contextual cues for RG (e.g., changes in user behaviors) in long-term conversations. We present THEANINE, a framework for LLM-based lifelong dialogue agents. THEANINE discards memory removal and manages large-scale memories by linking them based on their temporal and cause-effect relation. Enabled by this linking structure, THEANINE augments RG with memory timelines - series of memories representing the evolution or causality of relevant past events. Along with THEANINE, we introduce TeaFarm, a counterfactual-driven evaluation scheme, addressing the limitation of G-Eval and human efforts when assessing agent performance in integrating past memories into RG. A supplementary video for THEANINE and data for TeaFarm are at https://huggingface.co/spaces/ResearcherScholar/Theanine.

Key facts. Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 24 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2024.

Builds on

24 of 39 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue9 Jun
  2. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents27 Feb

Other references · 22

  1. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  2. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
  3. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  4. 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,205
  5. 2018Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?cited by 820
  6. 2020Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbotcited by 467
  7. 2021MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontierscited by 466
  8. 2024Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Modelscited by 431
  9. 2021Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversationcited by 266
  10. 2020COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphscited by 254
  11. 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agentscited by 206
  12. 2024Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalizationcited by 203
10 more
  1. 2023Walking Down the Memory Maze: Beyond Context Limit through Interactive Readingcited by 129
  2. 2022Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memorycited by 107
  3. 2023MemoChat: Tuning LLMs to Use Memos for Consistent Long-Range Open-Domain Conversationcited by 94
  4. 2022Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversationscited by 62
  5. 2023Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversationscited by 47
  6. 2023Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agentscited by 41
  7. 2024Compress to Impress: Unleashing the Potential of Compressive Memory in Real-World Long-Term Conversationscited by 36
  8. 2023Large Language Models are Clinical Reasoners: Reasoning-Aware Diagnosis Framework with Prompt-Generated Rationalescited by 33
  9. 2024Commonsense-augmented Memory Construction and Management in Long-term Conversations via Context-aware Persona Refinementcited by 14
  10. 2023Response Generation in Longitudinal Dialogues: Which Knowledge Representation Helps?cited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 7; 2026: 41.

50 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025Memory in the Age of AI Agentscited by 285
  2. 2025In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agentscited by 102
  3. 2025Rethinking Memory in LLM based Agents: Representations, Operations, and Emerging Topicscited by 36
  4. 2025From Single to Multi-Granularity: Toward Long-Term Memory Association and Selection of Conversational Agentscited by 27
  5. 2026TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agentscited by 26
  6. 2025Pre-Storage Reasoning for Episodic Memory: Shifting Inference Burden to Memory for Personalized Dialoguecited by 17
  7. 2026HiMem: Hierarchical Long-Term Memory for LLM Long-Horizon Agentscited by 16
  8. 2025PRINCIPLES: Synthetic Strategy Memory for Proactive Dialogue Agentscited by 15
  9. 2024The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trendscited by 11
  10. 2026Does Memory Need Graphs? A Unified Framework and Empirical Analysis for Long-Term Dialog Memorycited by 9
  11. 2026FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learningcited by 7
  12. 2026ES-Mem: Event Segmentation-Based Memory for Long-Term Dialogue Agentscited by 4
38 more
  1. 2026Oblivion: Self-Adaptive Agentic Memory Control through Decay-Driven Activationcited by 3
  2. 2024Enhancing Long-term RAG Chatbots with Psychological Models of Memory Importance and Forgettingcited by 2
  3. 2025EventWeave: A Dynamic Framework for Capturing Core and Supporting Events in Dialogue Systemscited by 2
  4. 2026HingeMem: Boundary Guided Long-Term Memory with Query Adaptive Retrieval for Scalable Dialoguescited by 2
  5. 2026MINTEval: Evaluating Memory under Multi-Target Interference in Long-Horizon Agent Systemscited by 2
  6. 2026Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers via Priority Rankingcited by 2
  7. 2026Learning User-Aware Recall: Personalized Retrieval in Long-Term Conversational Memorycited by 2
  8. 2026PGMem: Tightly Coupled Persona-Memory Graph for Lifelong Personalized Agentscited by 2
  9. 2026Retrieval-Driven Memory Reconsolidation for Long-Term LLM Agentscited by 2
  10. 2026MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Rerankingcited by 1
  11. 2026LLM-Oriented Information Retrieval: A Denoising-First Perspectivecited by 1
  12. 2026G-Long: Graph-Enhanced Memory Management for Efficient Long-Term Dialogue Agentscited by 1
  13. 2026When Personal Memory Has No Single Answer: Evaluating LLM Agents under Irreducible Conflictcited by 1
  14. 2026Harness the Memory: A Holistic Evaluation of Memory Substrates in Memory Agentscited by 1
  15. 2026Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agentscited by 1
  16. 2026MemoryLACE: Memory Lifecycle-Aware Consolidation and Evidence Retrievalcited by 1
  17. 2026Toward Robust Personalized Alignment for LLMs: Mitigating Persona Drift in Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 1
  18. 2026Memory Has Geometry: Non-Uniform Geometric Memory for Long-Horizon Personalized AIcited by 1
  19. 2026Implicit Graph, Explicit Retrieval: Towards Efficient and Interpretable Long-horizon Memory for Large Language Modelscited by 0
  20. 2026Embedded AI Companion System on Edge Devicescited by 0
  21. 2026ATOD: An Evaluation Framework and Benchmark for Agentic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 0
  22. 2026Memory as Metabolism: A Design for Companion Knowledge Systemscited by 0
  23. 2026DeferMem: Query-Time Evidence Distillation via Reinforcement Learning for Long-Term Agent Memorycited by 0
  24. 2026Enhancing Software Engineering Through Closed-Loop Memory Optimizationcited by 0
  25. 2026TrajWiki: Source-Grounded Memory Trajectories for Long-Horizon Dialogue Agentscited by 0
  26. 2026Don't Scroll Back: Missing-Evidence Memory for Streaming Dialogue Summarizationcited by 0
  27. 2026MemUse: Moving Memory Evaluation from Direct QA to Natural Integration in Long-Term Human-AI Conversationcited by 0
  28. 2026VIBE-Bench: Evaluating Personalized Large Language Models When Profiles Don't Mean Preferencescited by 0
  29. 2026FinLifeBench: Exhaustive Life-Event History and Financial-State Reconstruction from Longitudinal Banking Dialoguecited by 0
  30. 2026RuleMem: Active Rule Memory for Long-Term Conversational Agentscited by 0
  31. 2026ROAM: Robust Organization of Atomic Memories for Agents through Semantic Relationscited by 0
  32. 2026LifeFuse-Mem: Lifecycle-Aware State Fusion Against Temporary Overwriting for Long-Term Memorycited by 0
  33. 2026ThinkFlow: Self-Evolving Probabilistic Latent Memory for Lifelong Conversational Agentscited by 0
  34. 2026Interactive Memory Learning for Long-Term Conversationscited by 0
  35. 2026EMIR2: Evolution-Aware Memory with Intent-Guided Multi-Round Retrievalcited by 0
  36. 2026Contract Memory Compiler: Resolve, Then Traversecited by 0
  37. 2026Grounding Memory Summarization in Utility Intentcited by 0
  38. 2026Memory Consolidation Flattens the Temporal Shape of User Factscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024"My agent understands me better": Integrating Dynamic Human-like Memory Recall and Consolidation in LLM-Based Agents
  2. 2026Beyond Dialogue Time: Temporal Semantic Memory for Personalized LLM Agents
  3. 2026AdaMem: Adaptive User-Centric Memory for Long-Horizon Dialogue Agents
  4. 2026MemToolAgent: Leveraging Memory for Tool Using Agents Based on Environment and User Feedback
  5. 2026Memory Makes the Difference: Evaluating How Different Memory Roles Shape Conversational Agents
  6. 2026From Recall to Forgetting: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for Personalized Agents
  7. 2026HERO: Human-profile Enhanced Retrieval Optimization Framework for Long-term Agent Memory
  8. 2026AgentMemBench: A Systematic Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Term Memory Management Strategies in Conversational AI Agents