# MemLife: Curating and Reasoning over Long-Term Egocentric Video Memories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40195/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19828/) (2025)
- [VideoAgent: A Memory-augmented Multimodal Agent for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11481/) (2024)
- [MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05726/) (2024)
- [Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16009/) (2024)
- [Memory OS of AI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06326/) (2025)
- [Video-RAG: Visually-aligned Retrieval-Augmented Long Video Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13093/) (2024)
- [HourVideo: 1-Hour Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04998/) (2024)
- [On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05589/) (2025)
- [Deep Video Discovery: Agentic Search with Tool Use for Long-form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18079/) (2025)
- [AssistGPT: A General Multi-modal Assistant that can Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08640/) (2023)
- [Seeing, Listening, Remembering, and Reasoning: A Multimodal Agent with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09736/) (2025)
- [EgoLife: Towards Egocentric Life Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03803/) (2025)
- [Video ReCap: Recursive Captioning of Hour-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13250/) (2024)
- [VideoRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Extreme Long-Context Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01549/) (2025)
- [Mem-α: Learning Memory Construction via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25911/) (2025)
- [WorldMM: Dynamic Multimodal Memory Agent for Long Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02425/) (2025)
- [AMEGO: Active Memory from long EGOcentric videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10917/) (2024)
- [VideoARM: Agentic Reasoning over Hierarchical Memory for Long-Form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12360/) (2025)
- [Video Streaming Thinking: VideoLLMs Can Watch and Think Simultaneously](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12262/) (2026)
- [Agentic Very Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18157/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term egocentric video enables personalized AI assistants to reason about daily life. However, as video histories grow to hundreds of hours spanning months or years, reprocessing raw clips for every query becomes computationally prohibitive. Memory systems offer a scalable alternative by compacting videos into text representations, but often fail on practical benchmarks: either the memory does not preserve key evidence, or the retriever fails to locate relevant entries due to retrieval competition in growing search spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce MemLife, a multimodal memory system that constructs entity-grounded, first-person text episodes and retrieves them via a time-indexed agentic reader. Without training or query-time video access, MemLife improves over the strongest training-free baseline by 4.6--12.0% across four long-horizon benchmarks. To further improve memory quality, we propose MemOpt, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes the memory writer to produce faithful, informative, and retrievable memories. MemOpt consistently improves MemLife by 2.7--5.0% across different video and question distributions, with gains that generalize across writer and reader backbones and memory systems.