ES-Mem: Event Segmentation-Based Memory for Long-Term Dialogue Agents

TL;DR

ES-Mem introduces a hierarchical memory system with event segmentation to improve long-term dialogue coherence and context retrieval, addressing limitations of existing flat memory models.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel event segmentation-based memory framework that enhances semantic coherence and structural context navigation in long-term dialogue agents.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods on two memory benchmarks.

Robust event segmentation applicable to dialogue datasets.

Hierarchical memory improves context localization.

Abstract

Memory is critical for dialogue agents to maintain coherence and enable continuous adaptation in long-term interactions. While existing memory mechanisms offer basic storage and retrieval capabilities, they are hindered by two primary limitations: (1) rigid memory granularity often disrupts semantic integrity, resulting in fragmented and incoherent memory units; (2) prevalent flat retrieval paradigms rely solely on surface-level semantic similarity, neglecting the structural cues of discourse required to navigate and locate specific episodic contexts. To mitigate these limitations, drawing inspiration from Event Segmentation Theory, we propose ES-Mem, a framework incorporating two core components: (1) a dynamic event segmentation module that partitions long-term interactions into semantically coherent events with distinct boundaries; (2) a hierarchical memory architecture that constructs multi-layered memories and leverages boundary semantics to anchor specific episodic memory for precise context localization. Evaluations on two memory benchmarks demonstrate that ES-Mem yields consistent performance gains over baseline methods. Furthermore, the proposed event segmentation module exhibits robust applicability on dialogue segmentation datasets.