Beyond Static Dialogues: Benchmarking Realistic, Heterogeneous, and Evolving Long-Term Memory

AuthorsHan Zhang, Zihao Tang, Xin Yu et al.

arXiv 20262026

TL;DR

RHELM uses the LOOP pLan rOllout evOlve Prune pipeline plus heterogeneous external sources to expose that even Claude Opus 4.5 only reaches 38.1 average score on realistic long term memory.

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THE PROBLEM

Long term assistants lack realistic, evolving memory and score only 38.1 on RHELM

Existing benchmarks report that RHELM’s best model, Claude Opus 4.5, achieves an average of only 38.1 with external sources.

This means long term personal assistants still fail at multi source aggregation, misleading queries, and realistic temporal reasoning, even with million token contexts.

HOW IT WORKS

RHELM and the LOOP pLan rOllout evOlve Prune mechanism

RHELM combines Profile Generation, LOOP pLan rOllout evOlve Prune, External Sources, Dialogue Synthesis, and Question Curation to simulate year long, heterogeneous user histories.

You can think of RHELM like a life simulator with a planner as the brain, outcome narratives as experiences, and external documents as a personal archive.

This design lets RHELM test memory behaviors that a plain context window cannot, including implicit state conflicts, cross source aggregation, and evolving user preferences.

DIAGRAM

LOOP lifecycle for evolving personas over time

This diagram shows how RHELM’s LOOP module iteratively plans events, rolls out outcomes, evolves profiles, and prunes stale information along a timeline.

DIAGRAM

RHELM evaluation and memory paradigm comparison

This diagram shows how RHELM feeds dialogue and external sources into RAG baselines, long context models, and memory frameworks for evaluation.

PROCESS

How RHELM Handles a Memory Evaluation Session via LOOP

  1. 01

    Profile Generation

    RHELM initializes a six dimensional persona using Profile Generation, storing Identity, Personality, Traits, Relationships, Belongings, and Current Status in a strict JSON schema.

  2. 02

    LOOP pLan rOllout evOlve Prune

    RHELM runs LOOP to PLAN events, ROLLOUT outcomes with probability p, EVOLVE the profile, and PRUNE outdated attributes over the simulated year.

  3. 03

    Dialogue Synthesis

    RHELM applies Dialogue Synthesis to convert daily outcome bullets into realistic multi turn conversations across five dialogue categories aligned with the persona.

  4. 04

    Question Curation

    RHELM performs Question Curation to generate 1,305 QA pairs spanning seven categories and 27 challenging characteristics, including Memory Conditioned Misleading Queries.

KEY CONTRIBUTIONS

Key Contributions

  • 01

    RHELM benchmark for long term memory

    RHELM introduces a realistic benchmark with Profile Generation and LOOP, yielding 10 personas, 629 days, 11,764 turns, and 2,180 external sources with 500k 1M tokens per persona.

  • 02

    Taxonomy of 27 memory characteristics

    RHELM defines seven query categories and 27 challenging characteristics, such as Implicit State Conflict and Structural Navigation, to stress test nuanced memory reasoning.

  • 03

    Comprehensive evaluation across memory paradigms

    RHELM evaluates RAG baselines, long context models, and memory frameworks like MemGPT, Mem0, and MemU, showing best average scores of only 38.1 with external data.

RESULTS

By the Numbers

Avg score with external sources

38.1

+2.6 over Gemini 2.5 Pro (35.5)

Avg score without external sources

36.2

+3.6 over Gemini 2.5 Pro (32.6)

Misleading accuracy Claude Opus 4.5

41.5

+18.4 over GPT 4.1 mini k=20 (23.1)

Total QA pairs

1305

Seven categories across dialogue, external, and mixed queries

RHELM evaluates memory on 1,305 QA pairs spanning Fact, Temporal, Aggregation, Hallucination, Misleading, External Source, and Mixed categories. The 38.1 average score for Claude Opus 4.5 on RHELM shows that realistic, heterogeneous, evolving memory remains far from solved.

BENCHMARK

By the Numbers

RHELM evaluates memory on 1,305 QA pairs spanning Fact, Temporal, Aggregation, Hallucination, Misleading, External Source, and Mixed categories. The 38.1 average score for Claude Opus 4.5 on RHELM shows that realistic, heterogeneous, evolving memory remains far from solved.

BENCHMARK

Overall average scores on RHELM with external data sources

Average score across all RHELM categories with external sources enabled.

KEY INSIGHT

The Counterintuitive Finding

RHELM shows that adding external sources can reduce RAG performance, for example GPT 4.1 mini k=50 drops from 28.9 to 32.6 average but hurts some categories.

This is surprising because many assume more context always helps, yet RHELM reveals that naive retrieval over 500k 1M token histories can confuse systems and lower accuracy.

WHY IT MATTERS

What this unlocks for the field

RHELM unlocks a way to stress test assistants on realistic, year long, heterogeneous memories with misleading, hallucination, and mixed source queries.

Builders can now design and debug memory architectures, retrieval strategies, and safety behaviors against a benchmark that actually reflects evolving users, documents, and implicit constraints.

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