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ACL Findings2026

LiCoMemory: Lightweight and Cognitive Agentic Memory for Efficient Long-Term Reasoning

Zhengjun Huang, Zhoujin Tian, Qintian Guo, Fangyuan Zhang, Yingli Zhou, Di Jiang, Zeying Xie, Xiaofang Zhou

Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit remarkable conversational and reasoning capabilities but remain constrained by limited context windows and the lack of persistent memory. Recent efforts address these limitations via external memory architectures, often employing graph-based representations, yet most adopt flat, entangled structures that intertwine semantics with topology, leading to redundant representations, unstructured retrieval, and degraded efficiency and accuracy. To resolve these issues, we propose LiCoMemory, an end-to-end agentic memory framework for real-time updating and retrieval, which introduces CogniGraph, a lightweight hierarchical graph that utilizes entities and relations as semantic indexing layers, and employs temporal and hierarchy-aware search with integrated reranking for adaptive and coherent knowledge retrieval. Experiments on long-term dialogue benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval, show that LiCoMemory not only outperforms established baselines in temporal reasoning, multi-session consistency, and retrieval efficiency, but also notably reduces update latency. Our official code and data are available at https://github.com/EverM0re/ LiCoMemory.

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Cited by top-tier papers3

  1. Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language ModelingLingrui Mei, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Yuyao Ge et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
  2. Neuromem: A Granular Decomposition of the Streaming Lifecycle in External Memory for LLMsRuicheng Zhang, Xinyi Li, Tianyi Xu, Shuhao Zhang et al.ICML 2026 · 1 citation
  3. Dynamics of Cognitive Heterogeneity: Investigating Behavioral Biases in Multi-Stage Supply Chains with LLM-Based SimulationJiuyun Jiang, Yuecheng Hong, Bo Yang, Jin Yang et al.ACL 2026

Builds on11

  1. A-Mem: Agentic Memory for LLM AgentsWujiang Xu, Zujie Liang, Kai Mei, Hang Gao et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 1,138 citations
  2. MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term MemoryWanjun Zhong, Lianghong Guo, Qiqi Gao, He Ye et al.AAAI 2024 · 394 citations
  3. When to use Graphs in RAG: A Comprehensive Analysis for Graph Retrieval-Augmented GenerationZhishang Xiang, Chuanjie Wu, Qinggang Zhang, Shengyuan Chen et al.ICLR 2026 · 56 citations
  4. In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified FrameworkYingli Zhou, Yaodong Su, Youran Sun, Shu Wang et al.VLDB 2025 · 48 citations
  5. Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM AgentsAdyasha Maharana, Dong-Ho Lee, Sergey Tulyakov, Mohit Bansal et al.ACL 2024 · 30 citations

Related papers

  1. Chain-of-Memory: Lightweight Memory Construction with Dynamic Evolution for LLM AgentsXiucheng Xu, Bingbing Xu, Tian Xueyun, Zihe Huang et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
  2. GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM AgentsZhaofen Wu, Hanrong Zhang, Fulin Lin, Wujiang Xu et al.ACL 2026 · 8 citations
  3. HyperMem: Hypergraph Memory for Long-Term ConversationsJuwei Yue, Chuanrui Hu, Jiawei Sheng, Zuyi Zhou et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
  4. APEX-MEM: Agentic Semi-Structured Memory with Temporal Reasoning for Long-Term Conversational AIPratyay Banerjee, Masud Moshtaghi, Shivashankar Subramanian, Amita Misra et al.ACL 2026 · 1 citation
  5. MemORAI: Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence for LLM Conversational AgentsHung Pham Van, Nguyen Manh Hieu, Khang Pham Tran Tuan, Nam Le Hai et al.ACL Findings 2026
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