# REAL: A Reasoning-Enhanced Graph Framework for Long-Term Memory Management of LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10694 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10694/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 48 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03768/) (2020)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [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)
- [A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13501/) (2024)
- [Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers for Near-Infinite Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01889/) (2023)
- [Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08467/) (2023)
- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)
- [From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14802/) (2025)
- [Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07174/) (2023)
- [Data Engineering for Scaling Language Models to 128K Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10171/) (2024)
- [Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14225/) (2025)
- [LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision and the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04834/) (2024)
- [Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14848/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LycheeMemory V2: Efficient Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents via Semantic Segment-Level Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12990/) (2026)
- [What Eviction Destroys: A Restore-Counterfactual Audit of Forgetting in Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08279/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to interact with users over long time horizons. However, due to their finite context window, LLMs cannot retain all past interactions, making long-term memory management essential for storing, updating, and retrieving historical information beyond the context limit. Although recent memory systems attempt to address this issue by storing historical information externally, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: flat text-based memory organizations fail to capture explicit relations among memories, structured memory systems often destructively overwrite evolving facts, and current retrieval mechanisms remain query-agnostic and passive when evidence is incomplete. REAL constructs long-term conversational memory as a temporal and confidence-aware directed property graph, where each atomic fact is represented with entities, relations, valid-time intervals, confidence scores, and exploration intent labels. During memory construction, REAL adopts a non-destructive temporal update strategy that preserves parallel fact versions and their validity intervals, enabling faithful tracking of fact evolution. During retrieval, REAL anchors query-relevant root entities, decouples their exploration intents, and performs semantic evaluator-guided hybrid beam search to extract compact memory subgraphs. It further incorporates counterfactual inference to repair unreliable retrieval states and recover missing memory evidence through implicit logical relations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that REAL substantially improves long-term memory performance over flat-text, graph-based, and existing memory baselines, achieving an average improvement of 22.72%.