Dynamic Memory Forest: Constructing and Tracing Conversational Trajectories for Long-Term Conversation
Abstract
While large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in expanding their context windows, they still face great challenges in effectively organizing and utilizing long-term memory to maintain conversation consistency and coherence. Summarizing historical conversations has achieved remarkable performance, which, however, loses conversational trajectory and association, making it difficult to precisely combine memories from different sessions in response to current queries. To address this, we propose the Dynamic Memory Forest (DMF), a novel Consolidation-then-Growth framework for long-term open-domain conversation, which simulates the consolidation and growth processes of human memory by dynamically organizing long-term conversation histories into a memory forest of memory trees. To be specific, inspired by the principles of synaptic consolidation and plasticity from Cognitive Science, we first consolidate each session into memory units that preserve thematic coherence ("Consolidation"). Then, we first structure these units into memory trees and then grow the forest by dynamically connecting them through an evolutionary grafting mechanism, called Group Relative Voting Optimization, which mimics synaptic connection to decide whether a new memory tree should be grafted onto the existing forest or grow independently ("Growth"). For retrieval, we design an Entropy-Driven Memory Walk, constructing a logically coherent memory path via a navigation policy that prioritizes exploring high-entropy nodes. Experiments on three long-term conversation datasets show that our DMF significantly outperforms baselines in enhancing response generation for LLMs.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weiwei Sun 0001 | 44 | 100 DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2020) Conversational Search and Retrieval 68 Simulating User Satisfaction for the Evaluation of Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval 50 Towards Explainable Conversational Recommender Systems (2023) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 2 | Corby Rosset | 41 | 79 Zero-shot Clarifying Question Generation for Conversational Search (2023) Conversational and Session Search 73 Contextual Re-Ranking with Behavior Aware Transformers (2020) Conversational Search and Retrieval 43 Transformer-XH: Multi-Evidence Reasoning with eXtra Hop Attention (2020) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Hongjin Qian | 52 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Kam-Fai Wong COI: co-author | 58 | 6 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian assigned | 52 | 12 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong COI: co-author | 44 | 15 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 42 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 41 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoye Qu | 39 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 37 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Sheng-Chieh Lin | 45 | 3 | 76 Multi-Stage Conversational Passage Retrieval: An Approach to Fusing Term Importance Estimation and Neural Query Rewriting (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval 74 Contextualized Query Embeddings for Conversational Search (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 4 | Idan Szpektor | 45 | 3 | 71 On the Robustness of Dialogue History Representation in Conversational Question Answering: A Comprehensive Study and a New Prompt-based Method (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval 70 When relevance is not enough: promoting diversity and freshnessin personalized question recommendation (2013) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation |
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| 5 | Zhe Xu 0009 | 44 | 3 | 100 Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive Understanding for Emotional Support Conversation (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval 100 Intent-driven In-context Learning for Few-shot Dialogue State Tracking (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 6 | Weiwei Sun 0001 assigned | 44 | 3 | 100 DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2020) Conversational Search and Retrieval 68 Simulating User Satisfaction for the Evaluation of Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 8 | Wonduk Seo | 43 | 3 | 73 A New Query Expansion Approach for Enhancing Information Retrieval via Agent-Mediated Dialogic Inquiry (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion 34 Question-to-Knowledge (Q2K): Multi-Agent Generation of Inspectable Facts for Product Mapping (2025) Entity Linking and Alignment |
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| 9 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 42 | 3 | 73 AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion 73 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 11 | Liwei Wang 0009 | 42 | 3 | 100 RAST: Domain-Robust Dialogue Rewriting as Sequence Tagging (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval 65 Eliciting Knowledge from Large Pre-Trained Models for Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2022) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness |
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| 12 | Jianfeng Dong | 42 | 3 | 73 IVCR-200K: A Large-Scale Multi-turn Dialogue Benchmark for Interactive Video Corpus Retrieval (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval 45 Video Moment Retrieval With Cross-Modal Neural Architecture Search (2022) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 13 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 41 | 3 | 67 Cognitive Personalized Search Integrating Large Language Models with an Efficient Memory Mechanism (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval 62 Incorporating Explicit Subtopics in Personalized Search (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 15 | Corby Rosset assigned | 41 | 3 | 79 Zero-shot Clarifying Question Generation for Conversational Search (2023) Conversational and Session Search 73 Contextual Re-Ranking with Behavior Aware Transformers (2020) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 16 | Linchao Zhu | 41 | 3 | 45 Stitching Segments and Sentences towards Generalization in Video-Text Pre-training (2024) Video and Moment Retrieval 45 Align and Tell: Boosting Text-Video Retrieval With Local Alignment and Fine-Grained Supervision (2023) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 17 | Gustavo Penha | 40 | 3 | 70 On the Calibration and Uncertainty of Neural Learning to Rank Models for Conversational Search (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval 70 Pairwise Review-Based Explanations for Voice Product Search (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 18 | Negar Arabzadeh | 40 | 3 | 59 Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search (2023) Query Performance Prediction 47 Enhanced Retrieval Effectiveness through Selective Query Generation (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 19 | Huiqiang Jiang | 40 | 3 | 100 SeCom: On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval 38 Attentive Mask CLIP (2023) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 20 | Shengyao Zhuang | 40 | 3 | 46 Where Relevance Emerges: A Layer-Wise Study of Internal Attention for Zero-Shot Re-Ranking (2026) LLM-Based Reranking 46 A Setwise Approach for Effective and Highly Efficient Zero-shot Ranking with Large Language Models (2024) LLM-Based Reranking |
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| 21 | Jinheon Baek | 39 | 3 | 72 Knowledge-Augmented Large Language Models for Personalized Contextual Query Suggestion (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval 71 Realistic Conversational Question Answering with Answer Selection based on Calibrated Confidence and Uncertainty Measurement (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 23 | Di Wu 0054 | 39 | 3 | 72 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval 40 VisRet: Visualization Improves Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-Image Retrieval (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG |
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| 24 | Xiao Wang 0043 | 39 | 3 | 45 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion 43 Neural Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Models for Sparse and Dense Retrieval (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 25 | Nancy F. Chen | 39 | 3 | 100 Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval 70 Multimodal Dialogue State Tracking (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 26 | Adam Jatowt COI: co-author | 39 | 3 | 73 Search Intent Discovery by Structurization of Community QA Contents (2012) Query Reformulation and Expansion 43 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 27 | Tetsuya Sakai | 39 | 3 | 74 ChatRetriever: Adapting Large Language Models for Generalized and Robust Conversational Dense Retrieval (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval 47 Flexible Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Using Optimization Tables (2001) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 28 | Zihao Yue | 38 | 3 | 42 OpenMMEgo: Enhancing Egocentric Understanding for LMMs with Open Weights and Data (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding 42 Movie101: A New Movie Understanding Benchmark (2023) Video and Temporal Understanding |
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| 29 | Shu Zhou 0002 | 38 | 3 | 71 LOSDF: A logical optimization and semantic decoupling framework for question answering in multi-party conversations (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval 71 Enhancing Extractive Question Answering in Multiparty Dialogues with Logical Inference Memory Network (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 30 | Fan Zhang 0053 | 38 | 3 | 100 Query Generation and Buffer Mechanism: Towards a better conversational agent for legal case retrieval (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval 74 Structure-Aware Conversational Legal Case Retrieval (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 31 | Haiyang Xu 0001 | 38 | 3 | 45 Learning Semantics-Grounded Vocabulary Representation for Video-Text Retrieval (2023) Video and Moment Retrieval 45 Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024) Video and Moment Retrieval |
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| 32 | Qinggang Zhang | 38 | 3 | 76 Facilitating Generative Retrieval with Logical Denoising for Interpretable Conversational Search (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG 43 You Don't Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |
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| 33 | Weizhou Shen | 38 | 3 | 100 Generic Dependency Modeling for Multi-Party Conversation (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval 71 Retrieval-Generation Alignment for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 34 | Xueguang Ma | 37 | 3 | 44 Improving Query Representations for Dense Retrieval with Pseudo Relevance Feedback: A Reproducibility Study (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion 43 R2LLMs: Retrieval and Ranking with LLMs (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 35 | Haokun Wen | 37 | 3 | 41 Interactive Garment Recommendation with User in the Loop (2025) Conversational Recommendation Systems 40 Differential-Perceptive and Retrieval-Augmented MLLM for Change Captioning (2024) Multimodal and Graph RAG |
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| 36 | Falk Scholer | 37 | 3 | 47 Query association for effective retrieval (2002) Query Reformulation and Expansion 42 WikiHowQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Document Non-Factoid Question Answering (2023) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |