# Memory That Looks Forward: A Zero-Inference Prospective Term for Personal Memory Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22091 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22091/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13956/) (2025)
- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)
- [Safety in Self-Evolving LLM Agent Systems: Threats, Amplification, and Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23075/) (2026)
- [TriggerBench: Investigating Prospective Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23459/) (2026)
- [Thinking Ahead: Prospection-Guided Retrieval of Memory with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14177/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval over a personal memory store is retrospective: it surfaces what resembles the query, and it is blind to what the user has committed to do. We describe a prospective term for memory retrieval that costs no inference at query time. Commitments are held in an explicit ledger as dated or trigger-conditioned entries; memory items linked to a firing entry receive a salience boost, blended multiplicatively into embedding-based retrieval so that relevance remains sovereign. On a synthetic prospective-memory task set modeled on TriggerBench's published structure (48 blind-authored dialogues, 175 tasks), the term raised recall@5 on the hard stratum from 0.000 to 0.955 at the default blend weight and to 1.000 under a floor variant, with zero false boosts across 53 resolved-commitment tasks. Blind authorship also produced a scope finding: only 17-29% of naturally phrased commitment-trigger pairs defeat embedding similarity, so the term matters on a real minority of cases and must do no harm on the rest, which it does not. We position precomputed commitment linkage as the always-on floor of a layered design whose expansion layer is query-time prospection. Results are preliminary: the evaluation set is author-constructed, and evaluation on TriggerBench proper is committed follow-up work once its data is released.