# MemGuide: Intent-Driven Memory Selection for Goal-Oriented Multi-Session LLM Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Conversational and speech RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Conversational and speech RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/conversational-and-speech-rag/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [A Network-based End-to-End Trainable Task-oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04562/) (2016)
- [Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08743/) (2019)
- [TripPy: A Triple Copy Strategy for Value Independent Neural Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02877/) (2020)
- [MemoChat: Tuning LLMs to Use Memos for Consistent Long-Range Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08239/) (2023)
- [Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07506/) (2021)
- [Building a Conversational Agent Overnight with Dialogue Self-Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04871/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Bot: Prompt-Based Learning for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08118/) (2021)
- [Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13420/) (2023)
- [BERT-DST: Scalable End-to-End Dialogue State Tracking with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03040/) (2019)
- [ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02574/) (2024)
- [Multi-Domain Dialogue Acts and Response Co-Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12363/) (2020)
- [Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14031/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuning BERT for Schema-Guided Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00181/) (2020)
- [CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11617/) (2022)
- [Goal-Oriented Multi-Task BERT-Based Dialogue State Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02450/) (2020)
- [InstructTODS: Large Language Models for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08885/) (2023)
- [TOAD: Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs with Diverse Response Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10137/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [EvoMemBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory from a Self-Evolving Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18421/) (2026)
- [AI Meets Brain: Memory Systems from Cognitive Neuroscience to Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23343/) (2025)
- [Memory-T1: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Reasoning in Multi-session Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20092/) (2025)
- [Self-GC: Self-Governing Context for Long-Horizon LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00692/) (2026)
- [LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15597/) (2026)
- [From Faulty Memories to Corrected Actions: Dependency-Guided Rollback Repair for Memory-Augmented Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10502/) (2026)
- [MemLens: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Memory in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14906/) (2026)
- [MemTrace: Tracing and Attributing Errors in Large Language Model Memory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28732/) (2026)
- [Goal-Oriented Reasoning for RAG-based Memory in Conversational Agentic LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12213/) (2026)
- [MemFlow: Intent-Driven Memory Orchestration for Small Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03312/) (2026)
- [Cost and Accuracy of Long-Term Memory in Distributed Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07978/) (2026)
- [Towards Root Memories: Benchmarking and Enhancing Implicit Logical Memory Retrieval for Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23283/) (2026)
- [GraphMemix: Query-Aware Evidence Forests for Long-Term Multimodal Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26983/) (2026)
- [Back to Basics: Let Conversational Agents Remember with Just Retrieval and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11628/) (2026)
- [DP-MemView: A Memory Interface for Attribute-Level Transcript Privacy in Long-Term LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03130/) (2026)
- [Don't Scroll Back: Missing-Evidence Memory for Streaming Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09043/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems increasingly rely on large language model (LLM) agents, leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and long-context capabilities for long-term memory utilization. However, these methods are primarily based on semantic similarity, overlooking task intent and reducing task coherence in multi-session dialogues. To address this challenge, we introduce MemGuide, a two-stage framework for intent-driven memory selection. (1) Intent-Aligned Retrieval matches the current dialogue context with stored intent descriptions in the memory bank, retrieving QA-formatted memory units that share the same goal. (2) Missing-Slot Guided Filtering employs a chain-of-thought slot reasoner to enumerate unfilled slots, then uses a fine-tuned LLaMA-8B filter to re-rank the retrieved units by marginal slot-completion gain. The resulting memory units inform a proactive strategy that minimizes conversational turns by directly addressing information gaps. Based on this framework, we introduce the MS-TOD, the first multi-session TOD benchmark comprising 132 diverse personas, 956 task goals, and annotated intent-aligned memory targets, supporting efficient multi-session task completion. Evaluations on MS-TOD show that MemGuide raises the task success rate by 11% (88% -> 99%) and reduces dialogue length by 2.84 turns in multi-session settings, while maintaining parity with single-session benchmarks.