StreamMemBench: Streaming Evaluation of Agent Memory for Future-Oriented Assistance

Guanming Liu, Yuqi Ren, Hansu Gu, Peng Zhang, Weihang Wang, Jiahao Liu, Ning Gu, Tun Lu


Abstract
A central role of personal-agent memory is to turn stored information and prior interactions into future-oriented assistance. In daily use, useful cues come from what the agent observes and how the user interacts with the agent, and the agent must carry them forward from the current request to similar future tasks. Existing memory benchmarks usually test dialogue recall or task improvement in isolation, leaving the trajectory from streaming observations to later assistance largely untested. We introduce StreamMemBench, a streaming benchmark that constructs a two-step task sequence around each evidence anchor from EgoLife egocentric streams. The initial task tests evidence use, while the follow-up task tests whether feedback and interaction experience are reused. Four metrics diagnose evidence recall, initial evidence use, feedback incorporation, and follow-up reuse. Experiments with eight memory systems across two backbones show that current systems often fail to use observed evidence or turn feedback into reliable follow-up behavior, even when evidence is stored or feedback is incorporated locally.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.992
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:
20947–20960
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.992/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guanming Liu, Yuqi Ren, Hansu Gu, Peng Zhang, Weihang Wang, Jiahao Liu, Ning Gu, and Tun Lu. 2026. StreamMemBench: Streaming Evaluation of Agent Memory for Future-Oriented Assistance. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 20947–20960, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StreamMemBench: Streaming Evaluation of Agent Memory for Future-Oriented Assistance (Liu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.992.pdf