aiqbench analysis
PsychoAgent introduces a novel cognitive architecture that integrates affective memory with factual retrieval to resolve conflicts in LLM agents, moving beyond simple semantic similarity. The study demonstrates that prioritizing emotionally significant traces improves the retrieval of critical memories in controlled scenarios, offering a new mechanism for modeling human-like reasoning dynamics. This research advances the field by providing an inspectable framework where emotional salience directly influences memory access patterns.
PsychoAgent: An Affect-Sensitive Cognitive Architecture for Conflict-Aware Memory in LLM Agents
arXiv:2608.07438v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-like cognition does not select past experience by topical similarity alone: affective significance and unresolved conflict also shape what becomes accessible. We present PsychoAgent, a cognitive architecture for LLM agents that separates factual and affective memory and integrates both through a conflict-aware executive controller. Affective memories are first filtered by semantic relevance and then re-ranked by salience, preserving topical fit while allowing emotionally important traces to enter the prompt. Across three controlled conflict scenarios, the full architecture retrieved more conflict-critical memories than semantic-affective and single-memory RAG baselines (0.933 vs. 0.500 and 0.667), with a small semantic-similarity cost. Five blinded raters evaluated 27 outputs. After within-rater standardization, the full architecture had the highest overall mean (+0.22 SD), but corrected pairwise differences were not significant. A three-day illustrative trace further shows persistent affect, offline memory recombination, and selective memory reweighting. The findings support affect-sensitive retrieval as an inspectable mechanism for modeling human-like conflict effects in LLM agents.
Abstract:Human-like cognition does not select past experience by topical similarity alone: affective significance and unresolved conflict also shape what becomes accessible. We present PsychoAgent, a cognitive architecture for LLM agents that separates factual and affective memory and integrates both through a conflict-aware executive controller. Affective memories are first filtered by semantic relevance and then re-ranked by salience, preserving topical fit while allowing emotionally important traces to enter the prompt. Across three controlled conflict scenarios, the full architecture retrieved more conflict-critical memories than semantic-affective and single-memory RAG baselines (0.933 vs. 0.500 and 0.667), with a small semantic-similarity cost. Five blinded raters evaluated 27 outputs. After within-rater standardization, the full architecture had the highest overall mean (+0.22 SD), but corrected pairwise differences were not significant. A three-day illustrative trace further shows persistent affect, offline memory recombination, and selective memory reweighting. The findings support affect-sensitive retrieval as an inspectable mechanism for modeling human-like conflict effects in LLM agents.
22 pages total (12-page main paper + 10-page supplementary material). Revised after peer review. Accepted for oral presentation and publication in the BICA 2026 proceedings, Springer Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering (LNEE)
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
arXiv:2608.07438 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.07438v2 [cs.AI] for this version)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 205 words
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