PERSIST: Who-What-When Memory Across Sessions for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue

arXiv:2610.07725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern voice assistants may be shared by multiple users and should be able to answer questions about earlier conversations such as "When did I originally plan to leave?" or adapt their behavior to individual users based on past interactions. This requires more than retrieving a topically similar passage: the assistant must identify the current speaker, recover the relevant past state, and distinguish it from later revisions. We present PERSIST, a persistent memory system for multi-session, multi-speaker spoken dialogue that explicitly models Who, What, and When. PERSIST structures cross-session histories into readable event records and retrieves them with a 3W joint scoring mechanism that combines semantic content, acoustic speaker identity, and temporal state. For real-time full-duplex interaction, PERSIST further reuses intermediate representations from the dialogue backbone, avoiding query-audio re-encoding and reducing retrieval latency from 578.42 ms to 7.03 ms. We also introduce SpokenTrace, a diagnostic benchmark that factorizes evaluation along memory tasks and speaker-query types, exposing failures in recall, speaker attribution, and temporal-state tracking. On SpokenTrace, PERSIST achieves 85.08% end-to-end task accuracy and improves all-support EM@3 from 49.01% with BGE-large to 82.10%.

Abstract:Modern voice assistants may be shared by multiple users and should be able to answer questions about earlier conversations such as "When did I originally plan to leave?" or adapt their behavior to individual users based on past interactions. This requires more than retrieving a topically similar passage: the assistant must identify the current speaker, recover the relevant past state, and distinguish it from later revisions. We present PERSIST, a persistent memory system for multi-session, multi-speaker spoken dialogue that explicitly models Who, What, and When. PERSIST structures cross-session histories into readable event records and retrieves them with a 3W joint scoring mechanism that combines semantic content, acoustic speaker identity, and temporal state. For real-time full-duplex interaction, PERSIST further reuses intermediate representations from the dialogue backbone, avoiding query-audio re-encoding and reducing retrieval latency from 578.42 ms to 7.03 ms. We also introduce SpokenTrace, a diagnostic benchmark that factorizes evaluation along memory tasks and speaker-query types, exposing failures in recall, speaker attribution, and temporal-state tracking. On SpokenTrace, PERSIST achieves 85.08% end-to-end task accuracy and improves all-support EM@3 from 49.01% with BGE-large to 82.10%.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.07725 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.07725v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.07725 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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PERSIST: Who-What-When Memory Across Sessions for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue

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