Back to Basics: Let Conversational Agents Remember with Just Retrieval and Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11628v1
• Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:38:43 GMT
• Title: Back to Basics: Let Conversational Agents Remember with Just Retrieval and Generation
• Abstract summary: Existing conversational memory systems rely on complex hierarchical summarization or reinforcement learning to manage long-term dialogue history.<n>We identify two key phenomena: textitDecisive Evidence Sparsity and textitDual-Level Redundancy<n>Motivated by these insights, we propose method, a minimalist framework that brings conversational memory back to basics.
• Score: 36.056012318684175
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Existing conversational memory systems rely on complex hierarchical summarization or reinforcement learning to manage long-term dialogue history, yet remain vulnerable to context dilution as conversations grow. In this work, we offer a different perspective: the primary bottleneck may lie not in memory architecture, but in the \textit{Signal Sparsity Effect} within the latent knowledge manifold. Through controlled experiments, we identify two key phenomena: \textit{Decisive Evidence Sparsity}, where relevant signals become increasingly isolated with longer sessions, leading to sharp degradation in aggregation-based methods; and \textit{Dual-Level Redundancy}, where both inter-session interference and intra-session conversational filler introduce large amounts of non-informative content, hindering effective generation. Motivated by these insights, we propose \method, a minimalist framework that brings conversational memory back to basics, relying solely on retrieval and generation via Turn Isolation Retrieval (TIR) and Query-Driven Pruning (QDP). TIR replaces global aggregation with a max-activation strategy to capture turn-level signals, while QDP removes redundant sessions and conversational filler to construct a compact, high-density evidence set. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that \method achieves robust performance across diverse settings, consistently outperforming strong baselines while maintaining high efficiency in tokens and latency, establishing a new minimalist baseline for conversational memory.

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