Chronos: Temporal-Aware Conversational Agents with Structured Event Retrieval for Long-Term Memory
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
Abstract (arXiv)
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled conversational AI agents to engage in extended multi-turn interactions spanning weeks or months. However, existing memory systems struggle to reason over temporally grounded facts and preferences that evolve across months of interaction and lack effective retrieval strategies for multi-hop, time-sensitive queries over long dialogue histories. We introduce Chronos, a novel temporal-aware memory framework that decomposes raw dialogue into subject-verb-object event tuples with resolved datetime ranges and entity aliases, indexing them in a structured event calendar alongside a turn calendar that preserves full conversational context. At query time, Chronos applies dynamic prompting to generate tailored retrieval guidance for each question, directing the agent on what to retrieve, how to filter across time ranges, and how to approach multi-hop reasoning through an iterative tool-calling loop over both calendars. We evaluate Chronos with 8 LLMs, both open-source and closed-source, on the LongMemEvalS benchmark comprising 500 questions spanning six categories of dialogue history tasks. Chronos Low achieves 92.60% and Chronos High scores 95.60% accuracy, setting a new state of the art with an improvement of 7.67% over the best prior system. Ablation results reveal the events calendar accounts for a 58.9% gain on the baseline while all other components yield improvements between 15.5% and 22.3%. Notably, Chronos Low alone surpasses prior approaches evaluated under their strongest model configurations.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 11 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.
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11 of 20 references.
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Other references · 10
- 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
- 2023Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 2,185
- 2023Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflectioncited by 1,800
- 2024From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarizationcited by 1,411
- 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 656
- 2022Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labelscited by 508
- 2023Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Modelscited by 211
- 2025From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMscited by 119
- 2024Blended RAG: Improving RAG (Retriever-Augmented Generation) Accuracy with Semantic Search and Hybrid Query-Based Retrieverscited by 83
- 2025Learning Contextual Retrieval for Robust Conversational Searchcited by 6
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
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- 2026Ask Early, Ask Late, Ask Right: When Does Clarification Timing Matter for Long-Horizon Agents?cited by 2
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- 2026Beyond Top-K: Replacing Black-Box Retrieval with Interpretable Agentic Operations6 Aug 2026
- 2026Is Grep All You Need? How Agent Harnesses Reshape Agentic Search14 May 2026
- 2026CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding13 May 2026
- 2026Ask Early, Ask Late, Ask Right: When Does Clarification Timing Matter for Long-Horizon Agents?8 May 2026
- 2026Cited but Not Verified: Parsing and Evaluating Source Attribution in LLM Deep Research Agents7 May 2026
- 2026ByteRover: Agent-Native Memory Through LLM-Curated Hierarchical Context2 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
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