# CoreMem: Riemannian Retrieval and Fisher-Guided Distillation for Long-Term Memory in Dialogue Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in KV cache optimization, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 20 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [KV cache optimization](https://mlsanity.com/inference/kv-cache-optimization/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06839/) (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)
- [LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12968/) (2024)
- [Limitations of the Empirical Fisher Approximation for Natural Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12558/) (2019)
- [Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16008/) (2024)
- [Prompt Compression for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12388/) (2024)
- [Context Cascade Compression: Exploring the Upper Limits of Text Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15244/) (2025)
- [CarMem: Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLM Voice Assistants through Category-Bounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09645/) (2025)
- [LexSemBridge: Fine-Grained Dense Representation Enhancement through Token-Aware Embedding Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17858/) (2025)

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

- [Hiding in Plain Sight: A Diffusion-based Mitigation of Geolocation Privacy Leakage in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21363/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized dialogue agents require continuous long-term memory to maintain coherent interactions across multiple sessions. However, deploying these capabilities on consumer-grade hardware (e.g., 8 GB VRAM edge devices) introduces severe memory and compute bottlenecks. Existing systems typically rely on isotropic cosine similarity for retrieval and heuristic rules for context compression. These approaches lack a unified theoretical foundation, frequently suffering from the hubness problem in high-dimensional retrieval and syntactic fragmentation during compression. To overcome these limitations, we propose CoreMem, a resource-efficient edge-cloud memory architecture fundamentally unified by information geometry. First, Riemannian retrieval replaces cosine matching with a locally adaptive Fisher-Rao metric, effectively penalizing hub memories via Mahalanobis distance with O(Ndr) Woodbury acceleration for real-time search. Second, Fisher-guided discrete token distillation (FDTD) introduces a hierarchical sentence-to-token compression mechanism. It derives sensitivity scores from Fisher information traces, providing a principled compression-KL tradeoff augmented with explicit structural syntax protection. Evaluated on the LOCOMO and LongMemEval-S benchmarks, CoreMem achieves strong accuracy improvements, yielding substantial gains in Open-domain (+4.51 pp) and Temporal (+4.17 pp) reasoning. Extensive profiling confirms that CoreMem operates seamlessly within a strict 8 GB VRAM budget, successfully bridging the gap between resource-constrained edge devices and the demand for theoretically grounded, lifelong memory agents.
