LiveMem: Maintaining Memory State Continuity in Long-Running LLM Inference

2026-08-03Computation and Language

Computation and LanguageMachine Learning
AI summary

The authors address a problem where AI assistants forget earlier parts of a conversation because they can only remember a limited context at a time. They introduce LiveMem, a method that adds a special memory to the AI so it can keep important information over the entire interaction, even as the immediate context changes. Their experiments show that LiveMem helps the AI answer questions using past information that is no longer in the current view. This work treats memory as a separate, continuous state that works alongside the usual short-term context window.

large language modelscontext windowmemory statestate continuityattention mechanismpost-trainingcontext summarizationcontext turnoverkey-value memory
Authors
Zhichen Liu, Ruihan Sun, Hengjie Yang, Zipeng Wu, Zhaohan Chen, Xiaofan Zhang, Yang Xu
Abstract
Long-running assistants and agents consume interaction streams that eventually outgrow the context. Existing context retention, summarization, and retrieval preserve access to selected history, but do not provide a persistent state over the full lifecycle when working context changes. We formulate this missing inference capability as \emph{state continuity under context turnover}: carrying computation forward through a fixed-capacity memory state whose lifetime is independent of the active context. We introduce an intrinsic memory method, \textbf{LiveMem}, which augments a pretrained full-attention LLM with a memory state that preserves the historical information over the whole lifecycle while the main attention path retains a bounded KV window. Context turnover and memory state maintaining, memory-oriented post-training, and state-aware serving jointly make this memory state load bearing after its originating tokens are released. Our experiments show that LiveMem achieves leading overall performance among evaluated systems and other intrinsic memory methods. Experiments on LongMemEval show that LiveMem is able to answer the question based on the memory state, even when the supporting evidence has been removed from the current context, and evidence-distance analysis shows that useful information persists beyond the active window. LiveMem thus establishes state continuity as a distinct and complementary abstraction for continual LLM inference.