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Episodic Memory in Lifelong Language Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce a lifelong language learning setup where a model needs to learn from a stream of text examples without any dataset identifier. We propose an episodic memory model that performs sparse experience replay and local adaptation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in this setup. Experiments on text classification and question answering demonstrate the complementary benefits of sparse experience replay and local adaptation to allow the model to continuously learn from new datasets. We also show that the space complexity of the episodic memory module can be reduced significantly (~50-90%) by randomly choosing which examples to store in memory with a minimal decrease in performance. We consider an episodic memory component as a crucial building block of general linguistic intelligence and see our model as a first step in that direction.


Model-Based Episodic Memory Induces Dynamic Hybrid Controls

Neural Information Processing Systems

Episodic control enables sample efficiency in reinforcement learning by recalling past experiences from an episodic memory. We propose a new model-based episodic memory of trajectories addressing current limitations of episodic control.


Rhea: Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention for Conversational LLMs

Hong, Wanyang, Zhang, Zhaoning, Chen, Yi, Zhang, Libo, Liu, Baihui, Qiao, Linbo, Tian, Zhiliang, Li, Dongsheng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on single-turn tasks, yet their effectiveness deteriorates in multi-turn conversations. We define this phenomenon as cumulative contextual decay - a progressive degradation of contextual integrity caused by attention pollution, dilution, and drift. To address this challenge, we propose Rhea (Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention), a novel framework that decouples conversation history into two functionally independent memory modules: (1) an Instructional Memory (IM) that persistently stores high-fidelity global constraints via a structural priority mechanism, and (2) an Episodic Memory (EM) that dynamically manages user-model interactions via asymmetric noise control and heuristic context retrieval. During inference, Rhea constructs a high signal-to-noise context by applying its priority attention: selectively integrating relevant episodic information while always prioritizing global instructions. To validate this approach, experiments on multiple multi-turn conversation benchmarks - including MT-Eval and Long-MT-Bench+ - show that Rhea mitigates performance decay and improves overall accuracy by 1.04 points on a 10-point scale (a 16% relative gain over strong baselines). Moreover, Rhea maintains near-perfect instruction fidelity (IAR > 8.1) across long-horizon interactions. These results demonstrate that Rhea provides a principled and effective framework for building more precise, instruction-consistent conversational LLMs.