Achieving realistic human-like conversation for virtual characters requires not only a simple memorization and recall of past events, but also the strategic utilization of memory to meet factual needs and social engagement. Current memory utilization relevant (e.g., memory-augmented generation, long-term dialogue, and etc.) benchmarks overlook this nuance, treating memory primarily as a static repository of facts rather than a dynamic resource to be strategically deployed in dialogues. To address this gap, we design StratMem-Bench, a new benchmark to evaluate strategic memory use in character-centric dialogues. This dataset comprises 657 instances where virtual characters must navigate heterogeneous memory pools containing required, supportive, and irrelevant memories. We also propose a framework with different evaluation metrics including Strict Memory Compliance, Memory Integration Quality, Proactive Enrichment Score and Conditional Irrelevance Rate, and to evaluate strategic memory use capabilities of virtual characters. Experiments on StratMem-Bench which leverage the state-of-the-art large language models as virtual characters show that all models perform well at distinguishing between required and irrelevant memories, but struggle once supportive memories are introduced into the decision process.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on question-answering (QA) tasks because of their superior capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, LLM-based QA struggles with complex QA tasks due to poor reasoning capacity, outdated knowledge, and hallucinations. Several recent works synthesize LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs) for QA to address the above challenges. In this survey, we propose a new structured taxonomy that categorizes the methodology of synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA according to the categories of QA and the KG’s role when integrating with LLMs. We systematically survey state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA and compare and analyze these approaches in terms of strength, limitations, and KG requirements. We then align the approaches with QA and discuss how these approaches address the main challenges of different complex QA. Finally, we summarize the advancements, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets and highlight open challenges and opportunities.

Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) aims to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. Despite the progressive performance of existing approaches in e-commerce platforms, they still suffer from two challenges: 1) difficulty in identifying values at different scales simultaneously; 2) easy confusion by some highly similar fine-grained attributes. This paper proposes a pre-training technique for AVE to address these issues. In particular, we first improve the conventional token-level masking strategy, guiding the language model to understand multi-scale values by recovering spans at the phrase and sentence level. Second, we apply clustering to build a challenging negative set for each example and design a pre-training objective based on contrastive learning to force the model to discriminate similar attributes. Comprehensive experiments show that our solution provides a significant improvement over traditional pre-trained models in the AVE task, and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks.