Belhassen Bayar
2026
Amory: Building Coherent Narrative-Driven Agent Memory through Agentic Reasoning
Yue Zhou | Xiaobo Guo | Belhassen Bayar | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yue Zhou | Xiaobo Guo | Belhassen Bayar | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Long-term conversational agents face a fundamental scalability challenge as interactions extend over time: repeatedly processing entire conversation histories becomes computationally prohibitive. Current approaches attempt to solve this through memory frameworks that predominantly fragment conversations into isolated embeddings or graph representations and retrieve relevant ones in a RAG style. While computationally efficient, these methods often treat memory formation minimally and fail to capture the subtlety and coherence of human memory. We introduce Amory, a working memory framework that actively constructs structured memory representations through enhancing agentic reasoning during offline time. Amory organizes conversational fragments into episodic narratives, consolidates memories with momentum, and semanticizes peripheral facts into semantic memory. At retrieval time, the system employs coherence-driven reasoning over narrative structures. Evaluated on the LOCOMO benchmark for long-term reasoning, Amory achieves considerable improvements over previous state-of-the-art, with performance comparable to full context reasoning while reducing response time by 50%. Analysis shows that momentum-aware consolidation significantly enhances response quality, while coherence-driven retrieval provides superior memory coverage compared to embedding-based approaches.
2025
Disentangling Biased Knowledge from Reasoning in Large Language Models via Machine Unlearning
Zheyuan Liu | Suraj Maharjan | Fanyou Wu | Rahil Parikh | Belhassen Bayar | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheyuan Liu | Suraj Maharjan | Fanyou Wu | Rahil Parikh | Belhassen Bayar | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption across various domains, leveraging vast pre-training knowledge and impressive generalization capabilities. However, these models often inherit biased knowledge, resulting in unfair decisions in sensitive applications. It is challenging to remove this biased knowledge without compromising reasoning abilities due to the entangled nature of the learned knowledge within LLMs. To solve this problem, existing approaches have attempted to mitigate the bias using techniques such as fine-tuning with unbiased datasets, model merging, and gradient ascent. While these methods have experimentally proven effective, they can still be sub-optimum in fully disentangling biases from reasoning. To address this gap, we propose Selective Disentanglement Unlearning (SDU), a novel unlearning framework that selectively removes biased knowledge while preserving reasoning capabilities. SDU operates in three stages: identifying biased parameters using a shadow LLM, fine-tuning with unbiased data, and performing selective parameter updates based on weight saliency. Experimental results across multiple LLMs show that SDU improves fairness accuracy by 14.7% and enhances reasoning performance by 62.6% compared to existing baselines.
2021
Distantly Supervised Transformers For E-Commerce Product QA
Happy Mittal | Aniket Chakrabarti | Belhassen Bayar | Animesh Anant Sharma | Nikhil Rasiwasia
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Happy Mittal | Aniket Chakrabarti | Belhassen Bayar | Animesh Anant Sharma | Nikhil Rasiwasia
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
We propose a practical instant question answering (QA) system on product pages of e-commerce services, where for each user query, relevant community question answer (CQA) pairs are retrieved. User queries and CQA pairs differ significantly in language characteristics making relevance learning difficult. Our proposed transformer-based model learns a robust relevance function by jointly learning unified syntactic and semantic representations without the need for human labeled data. This is achieved by distantly supervising our model by distilling from predictions of a syntactic matching system on user queries and simultaneously training with CQA pairs. Training with CQA pairs helps our model learning semantic QA relevance and distant supervision enables learning of syntactic features as well as the nuances of user querying language. Additionally, our model encodes queries and candidate responses independently allowing offline candidate embedding generation thereby minimizing the need for real-time transformer model execution. Consequently, our framework is able to scale to large e-commerce QA traffic. Extensive evaluation on user queries shows that our framework significantly outperforms both syntactic and semantic baselines in offline as well as large scale online A/B setups of a popular e-commerce service.