arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Membox: Weaving Topic Continuity into Long-Range Memory for LLM Agents

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2601.03785 (cs)
[Submitted on 7 Jan 2026 (v1), last revised 24 Jun 2026 (this version, v3)]

Title:Membox: Weaving Topic Continuity into Long-Range Memory for LLM Agents

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Abstract:Long-term human-agent dialogues are organized by topic continuity: adjacent turns often develop the same goal, plan, problem, or event, while related activities may recur across distant sessions. Yet many LLM agent memory systems first decompose histories into isolated turns or fixed-size chunks, then compensate through enrichment, consolidation, or retrieval mechanisms still tied to semantic proximity or fragment-level records. This weakens temporal and causal organization and biases memory access toward semantic proximity rather than task- or topic-level continuity. We introduce \emph{Membox}, a hierarchical memory architecture that instantiates topic continuity as an explicit organization layer for agent memory. Its \textbf{Topic Loom} incrementally organizes dialogue streams into boxes whose internal turns follow the same local topic, while its \textbf{Trace Weaver} links extracted events across boxes into macro-topic traces that recover recurring activities, goals, and factual developments across distant sessions. On LoCoMo, Topic-Loom-only retrieval improves over the best Mem0/A-MEM retrieval-depth setting by 13.00 F1 points (53.95 vs. 40.95), and trace-expanded retrieval further raises F1 to 55.28; with GPT-4o, trace-expanded retrieval reaches 59.71 F1. Additional DialSim results show the same gain from adding cross-box traces in multi-party dialogue. These results show that local topic-continuity organization and macro-topic trace expansion improve long-range memory beyond semantic retrieval over fragmented records.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2601.03785 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2601.03785v3 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.03785
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Dehao Tao [view email]
[v1] Wed, 7 Jan 2026 10:36:29 UTC (406 KB)
[v2] Tue, 20 Jan 2026 07:09:21 UTC (406 KB)
[v3] Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:19:14 UTC (431 KB)
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