APDMem: Agent-Controlled Progressive Disclosure for Query-Adaptive Long-Term Memory

Abstract:Personalized LLM assistants must recover sparse evidence from long conversation histories across queries of varying complexity. We introduce APDMem (Agent-controlled Progressive Disclosure Memory), a hierarchical long-term memory architecture that applies progressive disclosure to memory retrieval. Rather than relying on a flat memory store or fixed retrieval granularity, APDMem represents conversation history as four progressively detailed layers: thematic summaries, personalized key facts, turn-level evidence notes, and raw messages. At inference time, a controller applies progressive disclosure to the memory hierarchy: it first reads high-level summaries and drills into finer evidence only when needed. This creates an adaptive cost-fidelity trade-off: simple queries can terminate early, while complex temporal, multi-hop, or exact-evidence queries trigger deeper inspection. A note synthesizer converts retrieved evidence into a query-focused structure that consolidates facts, orders events, and flags contradictions before final answer generation. Experiments on LongMemEval show that APDMem achieves strong performance for long-context memory reasoning while accessing only 8% of the total conversations.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.02472 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.02472v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02472 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.