/p/2026-10-24 · explainer
Paper explainer · 2610.30755 · Bao, Zhang, Zhang, Lou, Wen and Luo

The baseline nobody ran won six of seven.

Chunk the raw conversation into 256-token windows, retrieve the 128 nearest by embedding, rerank down to 15, hand them to the reader. No fact extraction, no session summaries, no graph. Against twelve purpose-built memory systems across four long-conversation benchmarks, that ranked first in 6 of 7 benchmark-and-model settings, by 0.13 to 5.53 points. The reason is not cleverness: across systems, how often the retrieved evidence was sufficient at all swings 26 points, while accuracy given sufficient evidence swings under 10.

01 · The baseline, in full

step through the pipeline

02 · The scoreboard

the strongest purpose-built system in that setting plain retrieval over the raw history

03 · Coverage, not cleverness

choose the benchmark, then tap a system
a purpose-built memory system plain retrieval over the raw history

04 · What the pipelines cost

05 · Your own memory layer illustrative

Results

What the paper actually measured

What it does not show

In practice