Zhanyu Shen
2026
AnchorMem: Anchored Facts with Associative Contexts for Building Memory in Large Language Models
Zhanyu Shen | Sijie Cheng | Zhicheng Guo | Weiqin Wang | Yile Wang | Hui Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhanyu Shen | Sijie Cheng | Zhicheng Guo | Weiqin Wang | Yile Wang | Hui Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
While large language models have achieved remarkable performance in complex tasks, they still need a memory system to utilize historical experience in long-term interactions. Existing memory methods (e.g., A-Mem, Mem0) place excessive emphasis on organizing interactions by frequently rewriting them, however, this heavy reliance on summarization risks diluting essential contextual nuances and obscuring key retrieval features. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnchorMem, a novel memory framework inspired by the Proust Phenomenon in cognitive science, where a specific anchor triggers a holistic recollection. We propose a method that decouples the retrieval unit from the generation context. AnchorMem extracts atomic facts from interaction history to serve as retrieval anchors, while preserving the original context as the immutable context. To reveal implicit narrative cues, we construct an associative event graph that uses higher-order event links that bind sets of related facts into shared event representations, strengthening cross-memory integration without relying on generic entities as bridges. During retrieval, the system anchors queries to specific facts and events to locate relevant memories, but reconstructs the context using the associated raw chunks and events. Our method reconciles fine-grained retrieval with the contextual integrity of interactions. Experiments across three closed-source and open-source models on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that AnchorMem significantly outperforms baselines.
Evaluating Memory Capability in Continuous Lifelog Scenario
Jianjie Zheng | Zhichen Liu | Zhanyu Shen | Jingxiang Qu | Guanhua Chen | Yile Wang | Yang Xu | Yang Liu | Sijie Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jianjie Zheng | Zhichen Liu | Zhanyu Shen | Jingxiang Qu | Guanhua Chen | Yile Wang | Yang Xu | Yang Liu | Sijie Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Nowadays, wearable devices can continuously lifelog ambient conversations, creating substantial opportunities for memory systems. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on online one-on-one chatting or human-AI interactions, thus neglecting the unique demands of real-world scenarios. Given the scarcity of public lifelogging audio datasets, we propose a hierarchical synthesis framework to curate LifelogBench, a novel benchmark comprising two complementary subsets: EgoMem, built on real-world egocentric videos, and LifeMem, constructed using simulated virtual community. Crucially, to address the issue of temporal leakage in traditional offline settings, we propose an Online Evaluation protocol that strictly adheres to temporal causality, ensuring systems are evaluated in a realistic streaming fashion. Our experimental results reveal a counterintuitive finding: current sophisticated memory systems fail to outperform a simple RAG-based baseline. This highlights the detrimental impact of over-designed structures and lossy compression in current approaches, emphasizing the necessity of high-fidelity context preservation for lifelog scenarios.
2025
LDIR: Low-Dimensional Dense and Interpretable Text Embeddings with Relative Representations
Yile Wang | Zhanyu Shen | Hui Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yile Wang | Zhanyu Shen | Hui Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Semantic text representation is a fundamental task in the field of natural language processing. Existing text embedding (e.g., SimCSE and LLM2Vec) have demonstrated excellent performance, but the values of each dimension are difficult to trace and interpret. Bag-of-words, as classic sparse interpretable embeddings, suffers from poor performance. Recently, Benara et al. (2024) propose interpretable text embeddings using large language models, which forms ”0/1” embeddings based on responses to a series of questions. These interpretable text embeddings are typically high-dimensional (larger than 10,000). In this work, we propose Low-dimensional (lower than 500) Dense and Interpretable text embeddings with Relative representations (LDIR). The numerical values of its dimensions indicate semantic relatedness to different anchor texts through farthest point sampling, offering both semantic representation as well as a certain level of traceability and interpretability. We validate LDIR on multiple semantic textual similarity, retrieval, and clustering tasks. Extensive experimental results show that LDIR performs close to the black-box baseline models and outperforms the interpretable embeddings baselines with much fewer dimensions.