2026

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly enhanced the capabilities of agents in modeling long-term conversations. Despite these successes, existing approaches typically adopt a static heuristic paradigm, where information is passively archived without adaptive memory valuation. Consequently, these methods fail to self-evolve or align their memory management with evolving user needs. To address this, we propose **ICML** (**I**ntera**C**tive **M**emory **L**earning), a multi-agent framework that transforms the memory mechanism from a passive archive into a learnable, interactive memory policy. Specifically, we first employ a session synthesis pipeline to generate expert data, facilitating rapid test-time adaptation in unseen scenarios. Building on this, **ICML** utilizes an online reinforcement learning mechanism where a Planner agent selectively encodes high-value information and a Trigger agent dynamically retrieves it to optimize response quality, whereby the two agents co-evolve through continuous interaction feedback. Crucially, both agents are synchronized through a delayed reward mechanism that propagates future feedback back to earlier storage decisions, ensuring memory policies are precisely aligned with user expectations. Experimental results demonstrate that **ICML** significantly outperforms strong baselines, exhibiting the unique capability to continuously improve response quality as interactions accumulate.
Lifelong conversational agents rely on memory systems to maintain deep, context-aware interactions with users. However, existing explicit textual memory pipelines suffer from a severe information bottleneck, often losing subtle behavioral patterns and emotional shifts. Furthermore, being typically static post-deployment, they cannot autonomously adapt to personal habits and preferences without manual feedback. Cognitive science, however, suggests that humans maintain mental models purely in a latent space and continuously refine them through predictive coding. Inspired by this, we propose **ThinkFlow**, a novel end-to-end latent memory framework for lifelong conversational agents. ThinkFlow bypasses the text bottleneck by dynamically compressing conversational flows into probabilistic latent memory skills, autonomously consolidating complex user states into disentangled, continuous vectors without semantic interference. To break this barrier, we introduce a test-time evolution paradigm. By coupling teacher-guided latent alignment to bootstrap the initial state with a self-supervised next-user-utterance prediction task for continuous refinement, the framework successfully overcomes cold-start challenges and achieves label-free lifelong personalization. Extensive experiments on long-term conversation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkFlow significantly outperforms prevailing memory systems, providing highly personalized and contextually accurate responses over extended multi-session interactions.
Despite their potential in standardized graph tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain brittle to real-world shifts in node identifiers and task formulation. While deterministic graph tools are invariant to such shifts, extracting topological structures from noisy text is highly fragile for LLMs, which often overfit to surface patterns. Moreover, mitigating these parsing failures via multi-agent systems incurs prohibitive latency. To address this, we propose GRAIN, a single-agent framework optimized via reinforcement learning. GRAIN models reasoning as a semantic parsing and tool-execution pipeline, guided by a Structure Invariance Reward. By validating extracted intermediate graphs against ground-truth topologies, this reward forces the LLM to learn robust text-to-structure mappings rather than memorizing linguistic artifacts. We also introduce GRIT, a benchmark evaluating sensitivity to such linguistic shifts. GRAIN outperforms multi-agent baselines by 16.45% in accuracy with approximately 24% lower latency. Furthermore, it demonstrates superior structural generalization, halving the out-of-distribution (OOD) gap of SFT models (from 15.77% to 7.80%) and maintaining robustness on large-scale graphs beyond the training distribution.

2025

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant breakthroughs in extracting useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. Summarizing useful information from historical conversations has achieved remarkable performance, which, however, may introduce irrelevant or redundant information, making it difficult to flexibly choose and integrate key information from different sessions during memory retrieval. To address this issue, we propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework, a novel memory utilization approach for long-term open-domain conversation, called FraCom. To be specific, inspired by the concept of proposition representation from Cognitive Psychology, we first represent the conversation history as a series of predicates plus arguments for propositional representation to preserve key information useful for memory (“Fragment”). Then, we compose propositional graphs for the conversation history based on the connection between shared arguments (“Compose”). During retrieval, we retrieve relevant propositions from the graph based on arguments from the current query. This essentially allows for flexible and effective utilization of related information in long-term memory for better response generation towards a query. Experimental results on four long-term open-domain conversation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our FraCom in memory utilization and its ability to enhance response generation for LLMs.