Memory-related issues

[manglu097]

Thank you for your cutting-edge work.

I have some questions regarding certain memory details in the article:

1. "Given the selected skills At, the executor (fixed) constructs memory updates by conditioning an LLM on (i) the current text span xt, (ii) the retrieved memory items Mt, and (iii) the selected skills At." Does xt refer to the current task? How is Mt retrieved? Is it through dense vector retrieval?

2. Also, the organization of Mt is unclear, leading me to wonder how the operations output by the executor are actually applied to Mt.

[ViktorAxelsen]

Thank you for your interest in our work and for the thoughtful questions.

For your first question, x_t refers to a text span or chunk from the interaction history. For example, in a conversation setting, it can correspond to one part of a session, an entire session, or in general any segment of text with arbitrary length, depending on how the data is organized. M_t is retrieved through a standard RAG-style retrieval pipeline, which in our implementation is based on dense vector retrieval. Since retrieval itself is not the main focus of MemSkill, we intentionally keep this part largely aligned with common practice in related work rather than introducing a new retrieval design.

For your second question, the detailed organization of the memory bank, as well as how the executor outputs are parsed and applied to memory, is more of an implementation-level detail. To keep the paper focused on the high-level framework, we did not expand on this part in depth. Concretely, the organization of M_t can be found in src/memory_bank.py, and the process for applying executor outputs to the memory bank can be found in the apply_to_memory_bank function in src/executor.py. At a high level, each memory item mainly consists of memory content together with metadata such as embeddings. The executor is prompted to produce outputs that follow a simple constrained format specified in the instructions, and a parser then extracts the corresponding CRUD-style operations to apply to the memory bank.

Hope this helps clarify things.

[manglu097]

A very solid response, with a very clear explanation. 3Q