ArXiv

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

Authors
Zhichen Liu, Ruihan Sun, Hengjie Yang...
Categories
cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02515v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02515v1

Brief

LiveMem targets long-running LLM inference by formalizing state continuity under context turnover and adding a persistent memory state to pretrained full-attention models while keeping a bounded KV attention window. The approach combines memory-oriented post-training and state-aware serving; experiments on LongMemEval show LiveMem outperforms other intrinsic-memory methods and retains usable evidence after eviction from the active context.

Why it matters

LiveMem defines “state continuity under context turnover” and augments pretrained full-attention LLMs with a persistent memory state that preserves historical information while the main attention path uses a bounded KV window; key components are memory-oriented post-training and state-aware serving.

Key details

  • On the LongMemEval benchmark, LiveMem achieves leading overall performance among evaluated systems and other intrinsic memory methods, answering questions from the memory state even after supporting evidence has been removed; evidence-distance analysis shows useful information persists past the active window.
  • Paper by Zhichen Liu, Ruihan Sun, Hengjie Yang, Zipeng Wu, Zhaohan Chen, Xiaofan Zhang, and Yang Xu, posted to arXiv 2026-08-03 (cs.CL, cs.LG).
Source evidence

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.