Zihan Wang

2papers

2 Papers

10.0CLFeb 18
MemoryArena: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Interdependent Multi-Session Agentic Tasks

Zexue He, Yu Wang, Churan Zhi et al.

Existing evaluations of agents with memory typically assess memorization and action in isolation. One class of benchmarks evaluates memorization by testing recall of past conversations or text but fails to capture how memory is used to guide future decisions. Another class focuses on agents acting in single-session tasks without the need for long-term memory. However, in realistic settings, memorization and action are tightly coupled: agents acquire memory while interacting with the environment, and subsequently rely on that memory to solve future tasks. To capture this setting, we introduce MemoryArena, a unified evaluation gym for benchmarking agent memory in multi-session Memory-Agent-Environment loops. The benchmark consists of human-crafted agentic tasks with explicitly interdependent subtasks, where agents must learn from earlier actions and feedback by distilling experiences into memory, and subsequently use that memory to guide later actions to solve the overall task. MemoryArena supports evaluation across web navigation, preference-constrained planning, progressive information search, and sequential formal reasoning, and reveals that agents with near-saturated performance on existing long-context memory benchmarks like LoCoMo perform poorly in our agentic setting, exposing a gap in current evaluations for agents with memory.

8.8HCMar 14
Is He Extroverted? Identifying Missing Relevant Personas for Faithful User Simulation

Weiwen Su, Yuhan Zhou, Zihan Wang et al.

Existing user simulation approaches focus on generating user-like responses in dialogue. They often assume that the provided persona is sufficient for producing such responses, without verifying whether critical personas are supplied. This raises concerns about the validity of simulation results. To address this issue, we study the task of identifying persona dimensions (e.g., "whether the user is price-sensitive") that are relevant but missing in simulating a user's reply for a given dialogue context. We introduce PICQ-drama (constructed from TVShowGuess), a benchmark of context-aware choice questions, annotated with missing persona dimensions whose absence leads to ambiguous user choices. We further design diverse evaluation criteria for missing persona identification. Benchmarking leading LLMs on our PICQ-drama dataset demonstrates the feasibility of this task. Evaluation across diverse criteria, along with further analyses, reveals cognitive differences between LLMs and humans and highlights the distinct roles of different persona categories in shaping responses.