Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2603.09297

TA-Mem: Tool-Augmented Autonomous Memory Retrieval for LLM in Long-Term Conversational QA

Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) has exhibited strong reasoning ability in text-based contexts across various domains, yet the limitation of context window poses challenges for the model on long-range inference tasks and necessitates a memory storage system. While many current storage approaches have been proposed with episodic notes and graph representations of memory, retrieval methods still primarily rely on predefined workflows or static similarity top-k over embeddings. To address this inflexibility, we introduced a novel tool-augmented autonomous memory retrieval framework (TA-Mem), which contains: (1) a memory extraction LLM agent which is prompted to adaptively chuck an input into sub-context based on semantic correlation, and extract information into structured notes, (2) a multi-indexed memory database designed for different types of query methods including both key-based lookup and similarity-based retrieval, (3) a tool-augmented memory retrieval agent which explores the memory autonomously by selecting appropriate tools provided by the database based on the user input, and decides whether to proceed to the next iteration or finalizing the response after reasoning on the fetched memories. The TA-Mem is evaluated on the LoCoMo dataset, achieving significant performance improvements over existing baseline approaches. In addition, an analysis of tool use across different question types also demonstrates the adaptivity of the proposed method.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Mengwei Yuan, Jianan Liu, Jing Yang, Xianyou Li, Weiran Yan, Yichao Wu, Penghao Liang. 2026-03-10. TA-Mem: Tool-Augmented Autonomous Memory Retrieval for LLM in Long-Term Conversational QA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09297

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Do Large Language Models Favor Recent Content? A Study on Recency Bias in LLM-Based Reranking

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in information systems, including being used as second-stage rerankers in information retrieval pipelines, yet their susceptibility to recency bias has received little attention. We investigate whether LLMs implicitly favour newer documents by prepending artificial publication dates to passages in the TREC Deep Learning passage retrieval collections in 2021 (DL21) and 2022 (DL22). Across seven models, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, GPT-4, LLaMA-3 8B/70B, and Qwen-2.5 7B/72B, "fresh" passages are consistently promoted, shifting the Top-10's mean publication year forward by up to 4.78 years and moving individual items by as many as 95 ranks in our listwise reranking experiments. Although larger models attenuate the effect, none eliminate it. We also observe that the preference of LLMs between two passages with an identical relevance level can be reversed by up to 25% on average after date injection in our pairwise preference experiments. These findings provide quantitative evidence of a pervasive recency bias in LLMs and highlight the importance of effective bias-mitigation strategies.

cs.IR

UniRec: Cross-stage Multi-Task Fusion with Preference Alignment for Cascaded Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems cascade stages with different objectives, feature spaces, and latency constraints. Optimizing pre-ranking and ranking separately induces cross-stage inconsistency: upstream models may filter out items preferred by downstream rankers, while independently tuned downstream fusion can offset upstream improvements. Most existing multi-task fusion methods target the ranking stage alone, and cross-stage methods often align with a downstream-derived score, leaving joint optimization of fusion modules across cascaded stages largely unexplored. We propose UniRec, a Unified Cross-stage Recommendation Fusion model. First, the two fusion agents partially share input embeddings in a single computation graph, allowing gradients from either stage to propagate through the shared representations. Second, a dual-axis preference alignment objective coordinates the two stages: horizontally, a compact aggregation term reorganizes dozens of pairwise objectives over heterogeneous prior signals into bidirectional preference evidence; vertically, a cross-stage consistency term transfers downstream pairwise preferences to the upstream fusion score. Third, we introduce attribute group-relative regularization, which computes relative advantages and normalizes policy updates within each attribute group, ensuring that uniformly promoting all items in a high-reward group provides no additional optimization gain. Offline experiments demonstrate UniRec consistently outperforms single-stage fusion and cross-stage coordination baselines; online A/B experiments show a 0.616% gain in app usage duration. UniRec has been fully deployed on the Kuaishou platform.

cs.IR

Scaling Articulated Rationales for MLLM-based Recommendation

We presented SARA, an industrial framework that transforms sparse articulated user rationales into scalable recommendation signals. Its data engine curates questionnaire responses into SARA-HQ, providing explicit preference supervision for aligning SARA-7B through SFT and Quality-Refining DPO. This alignment extends rationale generation from $86{,}564$ questionnaire-covered authors to the full $10$M-author space. SARA-Ranker translates the generated positive and negative rationales into features for user--author interaction modeling and negative-feedback history modeling, connecting articulated reasons to production ranking. Evaluation on unseen authors demonstrates that SARA-7B generates more specific, relevant, and grounded rationales than the evaluated general-purpose MLLMs. On top of a strong industrial ranking baseline with multimodal features, separate online A/B tests show that positive-rationale integration increases watch time by $0.99\%$, while negative-rationale integration reduces Hate feedback by $8.16\%$. Daily refresh and more than $30$ days of production deployment further demonstrate the operational feasibility of the approach. These findings establish articulated rationales as a useful complement to behavioral and content signals, and demonstrate a practical role for MLLMs in scaling sparse human explanations into preference information that improves industrial recommendation.

cs.IR