# Recall What Is Missing: Composing Evidence from Long-Term Agent Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15642/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 30 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (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)
- [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)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13956/) (2025)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19828/) (2025)
- [LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18866/) (2025)
- [Memory OS of AI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06326/) (2025)
- [SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02553/) (2026)
- [On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05589/) (2025)
- [MemOS: An Operating System for Memory-Augmented Generation (MAG) in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22101/) (2025)
- [Beyond a Million Tokens: Benchmarking and Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27246/) (2025)
- [General Agentic Memory Via Deep Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18423/) (2025)
- [Hindsight is 20/20: Building Agent Memory that Retains, Recalls, and Reflects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12818/) (2025)
- [ListT5: Listwise Reranking with Fusion-in-Decoder Improves Zero-shot Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15838/) (2024)
- [MemR3: Memory Retrieval via Reflective Reasoning for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20237/) (2025)
- [Beyond RAG for Agent Memory: Retrieval by Decoupling and Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02007/) (2026)
- [Shifting from Ranking to Set Selection for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06838/) (2025)
- [Are We Ready For An Agent-Native Memory System?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24775/) (2026)
- [A Unified Optimization View on Generalized Matching Pursuit and Frank-Wolfe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06457/) (2017)
- [Memory is Reconstructed, Not Retrieved: Graph Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06036/) (2026)
- [Influence Guided Context Selection for Effective Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21359/) (2025)
- [MemReranker: Reasoning-Aware Reranking for Agent Memory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06132/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Reranker: Boundary-Aware Evidence Selection for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03689/) (2026)
- [QUBO-Optimized Evidence Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering with Unconventional Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12334/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Under a limited context budget, a long-term agent must recall not merely memories that are individually relevant, but evidence that is collectively sufficient for the current query. Conventional memory access retrieves, scores, and truncates memories, often spending multiple context slots on redundant facts while leaving complementary evidence behind. We cast the read phase of long-term memory as query-conditioned evidence composition: each memory is valued by what it adds beyond the evidence already selected. We instantiate this operation with MemPursuit, a training-free mechanism that uses the residual of a sparse convex query reconstruction as a representation-space proxy for what the current memory set is missing. By reusing the query and candidate embeddings already available from retrieval, MemPursuit progressively composes nested evidence contexts without invoking a language model or cross-encoder to score each query--memory pair. The effectiveness of our method is verified on 3 popular benchmarks in comparison to strong baselines. In fixed-budget LoCoMo experiments, MemPursuit improves end-to-end accuracy by 7.2 percentage points at Top-10 and 5.5 percentage points at Top-20, with consistent gains across multiple memory frameworks, while achieving a 32.9× speedup in median reranking latency over fully batched BGE-v2-m3. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/FengQi-HITSZ/MemPursuit.