MINDSET: Energy-based Memory Evolution for Long Conversational Agents

Abstract

In conversational memory, a later statement may replace an earlier fact, describe a different context, or be an isolated contradiction. Thus, agentic memory must track what changed over time without erasing what was true before. We introduce MINDSET, a memory controller that makes this distinction through explicit state transitions. It preserves original dialogue episodes and organizes them into versioned schemas. For each new episode, it chooses whether to reinforce a schema, supersede its current state, create a contextual branch, or start a new schema. A local energy score balances coherence, contradiction, historical preservation and fragmentation. Stability rules prevent isolated conflicts from immediately replacing established memory. On a frozen 700-question LoCoMo subset, MINDSET achieves the highest observed answer F1 among six evaluated systems and significantly improves retrieval ranking over LightMem. Without retuning, it obtains 69.23% judge accuracy on all LongMemEval knowledge-update cases, compared with 64.10% for Vector RAG. Two additional answer model backbones using Gemma-4-31B and GLM-4.7 provide further qualified evidence of generalization. These findings support explicit memory-state management as a useful approach to changing conversational knowledge.