Memory Retrieval for Changing Preferences
For dialogue systems handling long interactions with shifting user preferences, this work provides a principled method to decide when and what to retrieve from memory.
The paper tackles memory retrieval in long-context dialogue systems where user preferences change over time. It proposes a Bayes factor-based framework that outperforms embedding-based retrieval on preference-intensive tasks, achieving competitive results across four benchmarks.
Long-context dialogue systems must decide both when to access memory and which parts of the interaction history are relevant. Existing approaches typically rely on heuristic retrieval signals or always-on memory usage, failing to account for the changing and potentially inconsistent nature of user preferences. In this work, we propose a unified framework for memory access and selection based on changing preferences. We formulate personalized memory retrieval as identifying which historical turns provide evidence about a user's latent preference state, rather than relying on surface-level semantic similarity. To this end, we quantify the utility of each memory turn using a Bayes factor, defined as the improvement in the model's likelihood of the reference response when the turn is included in context. This provides a principled measure of evidence strength and a unified signal for both memory access and selection. By framing memory retrieval as utility estimation, the model learns to identify salient turns and regulate memory usage based on expected utility. Experiments on four heterogeneous memory benchmarks show that our approach outperforms existing embedding-based retrieval on long-context, preference-intensive tasks where modeling changing preferences is essential, while remaining competitive in low-density regimes where semantic similarity suffices.