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Yang et al. (2026)

GroupMemBench: Benchmarking LLM Agent Memory in Multi-Party Conversations

arXiv

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Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly serve as personal assistants and workplace collaborators, where their utility depends on memory systems that extract, retrieve, and apply information across long-running conversations. However, both existing memory systems and benchmarks are built around the dyadic, single-user setup, even though real deployments routinely span groups and channels with multiple users interacting with the agent and with each other. This mismatch leaves three properties of group memory unmeasured: (i) group dynamics that go beyond concatenated one-on-one chats, (ii) speaker-grounded belief tracking, where the per-user memory modeling is needed, and (iii) audience-adapted language, where Theory-of-Mind shifts produce role-specific vocabulary. We introduce GroupMemBench, a benchmark that exposes all three. A graph-grounded synthesis pipeline produces multi-party conversations with controllable reply structure and conditions each message on per-user personas and target audiences. An adversarial query pipeline then binds every question to a specific asker across six categories, spanning multi-hop reasoning, knowledge update, term ambiguity, user-implicit reasoning, temporal reasoning, and abstention, and iteratively searches challenging, realistic queries that reflect comprehensive memory capability. Benchmarking leading memory systems exposes a sharp collapse: the strongest one reaches only 46.0% average accuracy, with knowledge update at 27.1% and term ambiguity at 37.7%, while a simple BM25 baseline matches or exceeds most agent memory systems. This indicates current memory ingestion erases the structural and lexical features group memory depends on, leaving multi-user memory far from solved.

Reference

Yang, J., Lai, K. H., Wang, X., Chang, S., Harari, Y., & Gabrilovich, E. (2026). GroupMemBench: Benchmarking LLM Agent Memory in Multi-Party Conversations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14498.

What Rests on This

1 mechanism cites this source. Each finding below is quoted as it appears on that mechanism's own page.

Partner Model Representational Structures

  • Measured in AI

    No published study gives an AI system the human partner-switch test across separate encounters, or compares with people an AI that keeps separate, lasting models of several individuals; AI memory benchmarks remain almost entirely one-user-at-a-time, so the evidence below covers pieces of the ability in different places: adapting to one partner within a conversation the model can still see, saved memory of one user, and memory for several people without any human baseline

  • Measured in AI

    Keeping separate records for several people is also unmatched by human data: in a 2026 preprint on group chats, eight memory methods averaged 20.6% to 46.0%, a simple keyword search scored 43.2%, and none exceeded 27.1% on keeping each person's changing information up to date; FANToM (Kim et al., 2023), where GPT-4 trailed humans on who knows what within one conversation, tests theory of mind rather than a lasting person model and is not used for this rating