TEM: Temporal State Tracking Memory for Large Language Model Agents

Abstract

An agent's memory must remain useful as information changes across conversations. A new fact may replace an earlier value without making that value irrelevant to a later question. We present Temporal State Tracking Memory (TEM), a training-free framework for tracking these changes. TEM stores facts as versioned records linked to their sources. It retrieves relevant versions, places them in source order and labels historical records before passing the evidence to the answer model. Event memory and original dialogue turns provide details missing from structured facts. We evaluated TEM on 420 questions drawn from 600 sessions involving 60 personas. Across four open-weight models, key-entity hit rates reached 75.71-97.62% overall and 96.67-100.00% on the historical-residence subset. Adding historical labels to otherwise identical, source-ordered facts increased overall hit rates by 17.14-55.95 percentage points. The evidence was compact: 94-118 tokens per answer, or 48.75-56.73% less than session-aware retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). A further evaluation on 1,540 LoCoMo questions tested hybrid memory under a fixed evidence budget. TEM exceeded session-aware RAG with both backbones; conservative score differences were 7.92 and 10.58 percentage points. The results support preserving fact versions and exposing their temporal status to the generator when answering questions about repeatedly updated information.