@inproceedings{lee-etal-2026-beyond,
    title = "Beyond {M}arkovian Forgetfulness: Episodic Memory for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval",
    author = "Lee, Dohyeon  and
      Jeong, Yeonseok  and
      Hwang, Seung-won",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1728/",
    pages = "37266--37280",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Reasoning-intensive information retrieval uses large language models to solve complex queries via multi-step reasoning. However, existing methods have critical limitations. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches suffer from inefficiency, while state-based methods, despite better token efficiency, often fall into reasoning cycles that trap the query refinement process. To address these issues, we propose Episodic Memory for Retrieval (EMR), which enhances the state-based framework with an episodic memory. This module stores the full history of prior states for a query, allowing the model to avoid repetition of such cycles. Experiments on the BRIGHT benchmark show that EMR consistently outperforms both CoT and state-based baselines. Moreover, it is highly token-efficient, reducing token usage by 72{\%} on average. Our results show that episodic memory is an effective and token-efficient mechanism for reasoning-intensive retrieval. The gains also generalize across different base models and stay efficient in terms of end-to-end latency. The code is available in https://github.com/ldilab/EMR."
}