D-SMART: Enhancing LLM Dialogue Consistency via Dynamic Structured Memory And Reasoning Tree

Lei, Xiang, Li, Qin, Zhang, Min, Zhang, Min

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit factual inconsistencies and logical decay in extended, multi-turn dialogues, a challenge stemming from their reliance on static, pre-trained knowledge and an inability to reason adaptively over the dialogue history. Prevailing mitigation strategies, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic working memories, improve information recall but still engage with fundamentally static knowledge sources and follow pre-defined single reasoning path. This hinders their ability to preserve factual and logical consistency of their responses in multi-turn dialogues while the context evolves over time. To address this issue, we propose D-SMART, a model-agnostic framework designed to maintain multi-turn dialogue consistency by enabling LLMs to build and reason over a dynamic, structured representation of the conversational context. This is achieved via two synergistic components: (1) a Dynamic Structured Memory (DSM), which incrementally constructs and maintains an authoritative, OWL-compliant knowledge graph of the conversation; and (2) a Reasoning Tree (RT), which executes inferences as an explicit and traceable multi-step search over the graph. As the popular-used quality score (judged by GPT -4) can overlook logical flaws, we introduce new NLI-based metrics to better measure multi-turn dialogue consistency. Comprehensive experiments on the MT -Bench-101 benchmark show that D-SMART significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, elevating the dialogue consistency score by over 48% for both proprietary and open-source models, and notably improves the quality score of the latter by up to 10.1%.