LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generation

Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to effectively leverage historical interaction information in dynamic and complex environments. Memory systems enable LLMs to move beyond stateless interactions by introducing persistent information storage, retrieval, and utilization mechanisms. However, existing memory systems often introduce substantial time and computational overhead. To this end, we introduce a new memory system called LightMem, which strikes a balance between the performance and efficiency of memory systems. Inspired by the Atkinson-Shiffrin model of human memory, LightMem organizes memory into three complementary stages. First, cognition-inspired sensory memory rapidly filters irrelevant information through lightweight compression and groups information according to their topics. Next, topic-aware short-term memory consolidates these topic-based groups, organizing and summarizing content for more structured access. Finally, long-term memory with sleep-time update employs an offline procedure that decouples consolidation from online inference. Experiments on LongMemEval with GPT and Qwen backbones show that LightMem outperforms strong baselines in accuracy (up to 10.9% gains) while reducing token usage by up to 117x, API calls by up to 159x, and runtime by over 12x. The code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem.

SciCUEval: A Comprehensive Dataset for Evaluating Scientific Context Understanding in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in contextual understanding and reasoning. However, evaluating their performance across diverse scientific domains remains underexplored, as existing benchmarks primarily focus on general domains and fail to capture the intricate complexity of scientific data. To bridge this gap, we construct SciCUEval, a comprehensive benchmark dataset tailored to assess the scientific context understanding capability of LLMs. It comprises ten domain-specific sub-datasets spanning biology, chemistry, physics, biomedicine, and materials science, integrating diverse data modalities including structured tables, knowledge graphs, and unstructured texts. SciCUEval systematically evaluates four core competencies: Relevant information identification, Information-absence detection, Multi-source information integration, and Context-aware inference, through a variety of question formats. We conduct extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs on SciCUEval, providing a fine-grained analysis of their strengths and limitations in scientific context understanding, and offering valuable insights for the future development of scientific-domain LLMs.