# From Unstructured Recall to Schema-Grounded Memory: Reliable AI Memory via Iterative, Schema-Aware Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [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)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07763/) (2024)
- [Why Language Models Hallucinate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04664/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17617/) (2023)
- [Grammar-Aligned Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21047/) (2024)
- [Solving a Million-Step LLM Task with Zero Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09030/) (2025)
- [On the Fundamental Limits of LLMs at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12869/) (2025)
- [Learning to Extract Structured Entities Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04437/) (2024)
- [OneKE: A Dockerized Schema-Guided LLM Agent-based Knowledge Extraction System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20005/) (2024)
- [An Information Theoretic Perspective on Agentic System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21720/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Beyond Retrieval: Analytic Memory for Multimodal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29440/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Persistent AI memory is often reduced to a retrieval problem: store prior interactions as text, embed them, and ask the model to recover relevant context later. This design is useful for thematic recall, but it is mismatched to the kinds of memory that agents need in production: exact facts, current state, updates and deletions, aggregation, relations, negative queries, and explicit unknowns. These operations require memory to behave less like search and more like a system of record. This paper argues that reliable external AI memory must be schema-grounded. Schemas define what must be remembered, what may be ignored, and which values must never be inferred. We present an iterative, schema-aware write path that decomposes memory ingestion into object detection, field detection, and field-value extraction, with validation gates, local retries, and stateful prompt control. The result shifts interpretation from the read path to the write path: reads become constrained queries over verified records rather than repeated inference over retrieved prose. We evaluate this design on structured extraction and end-to-end memory benchmarks. On the extraction benchmark, the judge-in-the-loop configuration reaches 90.42% object-level accuracy and 62.67% output accuracy, above all tested frontier structured-output baselines. On our end-to-end memory benchmark, xmemory reaches 97.10% F1, compared with 80.16%-87.24% across the third-party baselines. On the application-level task, xmemory reaches 95.2% accuracy, outperforming specialised memory systems, code-generated Markdown harnesses, and customer-facing frontier-model application harnesses. The results show that, for memory workloads requiring stable facts and stateful computation, architecture matters more than retrieval scale or model strength alone.