Papers for
enterprise knowledge managers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Memory system stores full documents for better long-term answers
Mem++: Non-Destructive Memory for Long-Term Organizational LLM Agents
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents now take part in organizational work, where many authors record decisions across documents over months. Because a revised decision arrives as a new document rather than an edit, answering a question requires knowing which version held at a given time. However, most memory systems compress the record at write time. By distilling each document into facts, notes or graph edges, these methods fix what can be answered before any question is asked. To address this, we propose Mem++, a non-destructive memory framework shifting from write-time distillation to read-time selection. Mem++ stores every document whole with its date and author, and it calls no generative model at write time. At read time, it retrieves only documents dated up to the time a question asks about and fuses lexical and semantic rankings. Unlike systems that overwrite older versions, Mem++ keeps them and leaves the choice to the answering model. Evaluations on the organizational benchmark OrgMemBench demonstrate that Mem++ surpasses the strongest memory system baseline by 8.0 to 13.1 points across two answering models. With gpt-4.1-mini, it also achieves the best overall score, 2.6 points above RAG. In addition, Mem++ achieves the best average LLM-judge score on LoCoMo and ranks second on LongMemEval-S, behind only its entity-graph variant. Code for benchmark evaluation is available at https://github.com/AIDAChip-Inc/mem-plus-plus.
SkillSpec improves agent task knowledge retention and organization
SkillSpec: Consensus-Gated Agent Skill Evolution via Representation Specialization
Abstract: Natural-language skills are textual procedural memories through which large language model (LLM) agents retain reusable task knowledge without updating model weights. Existing methods typically treat skills as either static artifacts or monolithic documents optimized using aggregate validation scores as feedback. However, representing a skill as a monolithic document restricts optimization to its textual content, without explicitly modeling the structure through which procedural knowledge is retrieved and executed. We identify a key distinction between learning what knowledge to retain and determining how to organize it: textual updates should first be validated through execution evidence, after which the retained knowledge should be structured according to its procedural dependencies and retrieval requirements. To this end, we introduce SkillSpec, a two-phase framework comprising consensus-gated evolution and representation specialization. In the consensus-gated phase, complementary editing intents generate complete candidate skills. An update is committed only when paired evaluations reach consensus, requiring sufficient overall improvement and non-negative aggregate paired gain in every repeated evaluation. In the specialization phase, signals of process and redundancy sensitivity derived from the full optimization trajectory, including accepted and rejected candidates, guide the selection of a flat, graph, or hybrid representation.Across six benchmarks and three target language models, SkillSpec improves average success rate over SkillOpt by 6.89%, averaged across the three models. These results demonstrate that reliable skill evolution and representation specialization address complementary objectives: deciding what knowledge to retain and how to structure it for inference.
Llm-based evidence selection improves query expansion effectiveness
EviQE: Evidence Selection for LLM-Based Query Expansion
Abstract: LLM-based query expansion increasingly conditions reformulation on documents retrieved from the target corpus, yet most work focuses on how to generate expansions rather than which documents the model should read. We propose EviQE, which aggregates documents retrieved by multiple reformulators, selects a compact evidence set, and uses it for one grounded expansion step. This separates evidence selection from generation and treats reformulators as complementary retrieval perspectives. Across three TREC DL and five BEIR benchmarks, reformulators frequently retrieve distinct relevant documents, so pooled candidates provide higher relevant-document coverage than any individual source. The strongest gains come from relevance-based evidence selection: LLM-Score consistently outperforms direct reformulation, cold-start expansion, and single-source seeded expansion. Additional retrieval-generation rounds provide little benefit once strong conditioning evidence has been selected and can reduce effectiveness.
VikingRAG reduces tokens for accurate retrieval in structured documents
VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents
Abstract: State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases.