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.

In active retrieval (AR), large language models (LLMs) need first assess whether they possess knowledge to answer a given query, to decide whether to invoke a retrieval module. Existing methods primarily rely on training classification models or using the confidence of the model’s answer to determine knowledge boundaries. However, training-based methods may have limited generalization, and our analysis reveals that LLMs struggle to reliably assess whether they possess the required information based on their answers, often biased by prior cognitive tendencies (e.g., tokens’ semantic preferences). To address this, we propose Debiased Historical In-Context Learning (DH-ICL) to identify knowledge boundaries in AR. DH-ICL aims to reframe this self-awareness metacognitive task as a structured pattern-learning problem by retrieving similar historical queries as high-confidence in-context examples to guide LLMs to identify knowledge boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce a historical bias calibration strategy that leverages deviations in the model’s past response logits to mitigate cognitive biases in its current knowledge boundary assessment. Experiments on four QA benchmarks show that DH-ICL achieves performance comparable to full retrieval on LLaMA with only half the number of retrievals, without any additional training.

Understanding the internal origins of capabilities in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for interpretability and efficient adaptation. However, the emergence of specific capabilities remains poorly understood, as most existing approaches rely on external signals (e.g., performance shifts or gradient similarities) with limited structural grounding. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight and highly interpretable approach that links LLM capabilities to internal components by identifying correspondences at the level of attention heads. Specifically, we first define five fundamental capabilities, namely Mathematical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Commonsense Reasoning, Scientific Reasoning, and Professional Expertise, and employ probing techniques to detect the attention heads most predictive of each, thereby establishing capability–head mappings. For targeted instruction tuning, complex tasks are decomposed into these fundamental capabilities, and training data are selected accordingly. Experiments on LLaMA3.1-8B and Qwen2.5-7B show over 70% discrimination accuracy in identifying capabilities. On MMLU and BBH, our method improves accuracy by 1 to 1.5 points over the gradient-based method LESS and by 5 to 6 points over other intermediate-state baselines.

Prior research endeavors of the ensemble Large Language Models (LLMs) achieved great success by employing an individual language model (LM) rank before the text generation. However, the use of an individual LM ranker faces two primary challenges: (1) The time-intensive nature of the ranking process, stemming from the comparisons between models; (2) The issue of error propagation arising from the separate ranking and generation models within the framework. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose a novel ensemble framework, namely Unified Ranking and Generation (URG). URG represents an end-to-end framework that jointly ranks the outputs of LLMs and generates fine-grained fusion results, via utilizing a dedicated cross-attention-based module and noise mitigation training against irrelevant information stemming from bad ranking results. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework in both the ranking and generation tasks. With the close coordination of the ranking and generation modules, our end-to-end framework achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on these tasks, and exhibits substantial enhancements to any of the ensembled models.

Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) for low-resource scenarios. Typically, prompt-based methods convert downstream tasks to cloze-style problems and map all labels to verbalizers.However, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, vanilla prompt-based methods may struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. In this work, we propose a novel Discriminate Soft Prompts (DSP) approach to take advantage of the prompt-based methods to strengthen the transmission of general knowledge. Specifically, we develop a discriminative prompt method, which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers.Furthermore, to improve the inference speed of the prompt-based methods, we design a soft prompt co-reference strategy, which leverages soft prompts to approximately refer to the vector representation of text tokens. The experimental results show that, our model outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed, and obtains a 7.5% average relation F1-score improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel.