# Towards Lifelong Dialogue Agents via Timeline-based Memory Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [Walking Down the Memory Maze: Beyond Context Limit through Interactive Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05029/) (2023)
- [Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05925/) (2024)
- [Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05797/) (2022)
- [MemoChat: Tuning LLMs to Use Memos for Consistent Long-Range Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08239/) (2023)
- [Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08750/) (2022)
- [Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13420/) (2023)
- [Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09343/) (2023)
- [Compress to Impress: Unleashing the Potential of Compressive Memory in Real-World Long-Term Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11975/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Clinical Reasoners: Reasoning-Aware Diagnosis Framework with Prompt-Generated Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07399/) (2023)
- [Commonsense-augmented Memory Construction and Management in Long-term Conversations via Context-aware Persona Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14215/) (2024)
- [Response Generation in Longitudinal Dialogues: Which Knowledge Representation Helps?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15908/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08026/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Memory in LLM based Agents: Representations, Operations, and Emerging Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00675/) (2025)
- [TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02845/) (2026)
- [From Single to Multi-Granularity: Toward Long-Term Memory Association and Selection of Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19549/) (2025)
- [Pre-Storage Reasoning for Episodic Memory: Shifting Inference Burden to Memory for Personalized Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10852/) (2025)
- [HiMem: Hierarchical Long-Term Memory for LLM Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06377/) (2026)
- [PRINCIPLES: Synthetic Strategy Memory for Proactive Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17459/) (2025)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [Does Memory Need Graphs? A Unified Framework and Empirical Analysis for Long-Term Dialog Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01280/) (2026)
- [FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03938/) (2026)
- [MINTEval: Evaluating Memory under Multi-Target Interference in Long-Horizon Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18565/) (2026)
- [ES-Mem: Event Segmentation-Based Memory for Long-Term Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07582/) (2026)
- [Oblivion: Self-Adaptive Agentic Memory Control through Decay-Driven Activation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00131/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Long-term RAG Chatbots with Psychological Models of Memory Importance and Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12524/) (2024)
- [EventWeave: A Dynamic Framework for Capturing Core and Supporting Events in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23078/) (2025)
- [MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29247/) (2026)
- [HingeMem: Boundary Guided Long-Term Memory with Query Adaptive Retrieval for Scalable Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06845/) (2026)
- [Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers via Priority Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22505/) (2026)
- [Learning User-Aware Recall: Personalized Retrieval in Long-Term Conversational Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00017/) (2026)
- [PGMem: Tightly Coupled Persona-Memory Graph for Lifelong Personalized Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01708/) (2026)
- [Retrieval-Driven Memory Reconsolidation for Long-Term LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16053/) (2026)
- [Memory as Metabolism: A Design for Companion Knowledge Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12034/) (2026)
- [LLM-Oriented Information Retrieval: A Denoising-First Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00505/) (2026)
- [DeferMem: Query-Time Evidence Distillation via Reinforcement Learning for Long-Term Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22411/) (2026)
- [G-Long: Graph-Enhanced Memory Management for Efficient Long-Term Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13115/) (2026)
- [TrajWiki: Source-Grounded Memory Trajectories for Long-Horizon Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00967/) (2026)
- [When Personal Memory Has No Single Answer: Evaluating LLM Agents under Irreducible Conflict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13921/) (2026)
- [Harness the Memory: A Holistic Evaluation of Memory Substrates in Memory Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15008/) (2026)
- [Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30478/) (2026)

## 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.