MemoNoveltyAgent: A Historical-Memory-Augmented Multi-Agent System for Paper Novelty Assessment

JiaJun Hou, Hexuan Deng, Wenxiang Jiao, Xuebo Liu, Xiaopeng Ke, Derek F. Wong, Min Zhang


Abstract
To alleviate the heavy burden of paper screening, researchers increasingly rely on existing AI agents, such as AI reviewers or DeepResearch, for paper evaluation and novelty assessment. However, lacking specialized mechanisms for processing scholarly literature, their analyses often produce superficial results with noticeable deficiencies in quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce MemoNoveltyAgent, a multi-agent system designed to generate comprehensive and faithful novelty reports. Beyond retrieving concrete prior-paper evidence via RAG, our system incorporates a high-level abstract memory constructed from large-scale scholarly corpora. This memory organizes research into hierarchical trees to distill field-specific evolutionary trajectories, thereby providing a broader historical context. Furthermore, we decompose papers into discrete novelty points for fine-grained analysis and retrieval, while employing a self-validation mechanism to improve report faithfulness. Finally, to address the evaluation challenges of such open-ended generation tasks, we propose a RAG-augmented checklist evaluation method that enables reliable and evidence-grounded assessments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemoNoveltyAgent outperforms GPT-5 DeepResearch by 13.69%. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/SStan1/MemoNoveltyAgent.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1236
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
26159–26188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1236/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
JiaJun Hou, Hexuan Deng, Wenxiang Jiao, Xuebo Liu, Xiaopeng Ke, Derek F. Wong, and Min Zhang. 2026. MemoNoveltyAgent: A Historical-Memory-Augmented Multi-Agent System for Paper Novelty Assessment. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 26159–26188, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MemoNoveltyAgent: A Historical-Memory-Augmented Multi-Agent System for Paper Novelty Assessment (Hou et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1236.pdf