MGRetrieval: Memory-Guided Reflective Retrieval for Long-Term Dialogue Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in dialogue, yet redundant memory contexts severely limit their effectiveness in long-term dialogue agents. External memory systems have been proposed to improve memory maintenance. However, these systems mainly rely on one-shot retrieval, which limits their ability to retrieve sufficient and relevant evidence. Although recent methods introduce reflection into retrieval, their retrieval paths are generated by the LLM from limited evidence, leading to unstable retrieval and additional latency overhead. %These limitations highlight the need for effective retrieval mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose MGRetrieval, a retrieval strategy that grounds reflective retrieval in the semantic structure of historical memories. Specifically, MGRetrieval consists of two steps: (1) It references the structure of historical memories to construct a more precise retrieval path. (2) The LLM retains critical memories and determines whether accumulated memories are sufficient to stop further iterative retrieval. This allows the retrieval process to follow semantically meaningful paths. Through memory-guided retrieval and critical memory propagation, MGRetrieval gradually constructs concise and sufficient memory contexts. Extensive experiments on LoCoMo show that MGRetrieval outperforms the strongest baseline by 8.91% in F1 and 11.11% in BLEU-1 on average across Qwen2.5-14B and Qwen3-14B, while maintaining practical token and latency costs. The code can be found in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MGRetrieval.