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Sep 18

Chronos: Temporal-Aware Conversational Agents with Structured Event Retrieval for Long-Term Memory

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled conversational AI agents to engage in extended multi-turn interactions spanning weeks or months. However, existing memory systems struggle to reason over temporally grounded facts and preferences that evolve across months of interaction and lack effective retrieval strategies for multi-hop, time-sensitive queries over long dialogue histories. We introduce Chronos, a novel temporal-aware memory framework that decomposes raw dialogue into subject-verb-object event tuples with resolved datetime ranges and entity aliases, indexing them in a structured event calendar alongside a turn calendar that preserves full conversational context. At query time, Chronos applies dynamic prompting to generate tailored retrieval guidance for each question, directing the agent on what to retrieve, how to filter across time ranges, and how to approach multi-hop reasoning through an iterative tool-calling loop over both calendars. We evaluate Chronos with 8 LLMs, both open-source and closed-source, on the LongMemEvalS benchmark comprising 500 questions spanning six categories of dialogue history tasks. Chronos Low achieves 92.60% and Chronos High scores 95.60% accuracy, setting a new state of the art with an improvement of 7.67% over the best prior system. Ablation results reveal the events calendar accounts for a 58.9% gain on the baseline while all other components yield improvements between 15.5% and 22.3%. Notably, Chronos Low alone surpasses prior approaches evaluated under their strongest model configurations.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 16

Contextual Deconvolution for Variance-Stable Demand Sensing: Kernel-Modulated Operators in Promotional Retail

Machine learning demand forecasts optimize statistical accuracy yet leave excess operational volatility that inflates safety stock and amplifies the Bullwhip effect. We introduce Contextual Deconvolution (CD), a two-stage estimator that reframes demand sensing as a convex decomposition: a kernel-modulated banded operator separates transient promotion-driven shocks from a smooth structural baseline, and hierarchical partial pooling enables catalog-scale deployment without per-SKU training. The operator is data-derived, not imposed---it reduces to the identity wherever the promotional response is impulsive (most of M5, all of Favorita) and contributes only where genuine multi-day carryover exists, so the gains rest on the structural decomposition itself. Evaluating strictly out-of-sample on 30,490 M5 SKUs and 2,845 Favorita items, with calendar-aware baselines given CD's identical future calendar, we anchor the contribution on a full inventory-cost accounting: CD lowers safety stock, holding cost, and order variance but under-provisions event spikes, reducing total cost only when holding costs exceed sim20\% of stockout costs (95\% CI [17%,25%]); otherwise it is an operational-stability and inventory-capital layer, not an expected-cost minimizer. Its accuracy contribution is reliability rather than central tendency: across eleven baselines, CD attains the lowest cross-sectional dispersion of per-SKU error and mis-forecasts by more than 200\% on 0.8\% of SKUs versus 9.9--20.6\% for every baseline, ranking first on both in all four M5 draws. Because the Variance Ratio and std-based safety stock are minimized by any sufficiently smooth forecast, we treat them as diagnostics, not objectives. A supporting analysis shows the learned demand operators are non-normal, yet CD's compact parametric kernel matches their operational performance interpretably.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 27