Long-term conversational memory faces a timing mismatch: write-time summaries and graphs organize history before a future query is known, while independent retrieval can allocate a limited evidence budget to redundant or fragmented turns. We introduce Chain on Demand (CoD), a query-time evidence organization framework over an unchanged turn-level memory. Given a broad candidate pool, CoD constructs a temporary evidence chain by allocating a fixed anchor budget according to query relevance, lexical diversity relative to selected anchors, and newly covered query terms, followed by deterministic restoration of each selected anchor's same-session neighborhood. The resulting chain is used only for the current query, while the underlying conversational memory remains unchanged. In a paired comparison over all 1,986 LoCoMo questions, CoD achieves 82.2% accuracy on 1,540 non-adversarial questions and 76.3% on all 1,986 questions. On LongMemEval-S, one fixed configuration that indexes both user and assistant turns obtains 86.6% across all 500 questions. These results show that long-term memory can preserve the original conversation while deferring evidence organization until the information need is known.
Zechen Li, Qiannan Zhu Beijing Normal University, Mei Wang Beijing Normal University, Jia Li Beijing Normal University, Hua Huang Beijing Normal University
Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with pedagogical tutoring capabilities holds significant promise for education. Existing approaches simulate tutor behaviors or preferences and use them to prompt or fine-tune LLMs for dialogue tutoring. However, such methods often fail to sustain high-quality pedagogical conversations that provide explicit stepwise scaffolding and adapt to learners’ evolving cognitive states. To address this, we propose ScaffoldLM, a planning-guided tutoring framework with an assessment-driven memory for multi-turn math dialogue tutoring. ScaffoldLM first generates a stepwise pedagogical plan from solution steps, which serves as a stable backbone for explicit scaffolding. During tutoring, the tutoring memory is updated by an assessment-driven control loop that infers the learner’s cognitive state, evaluates whether the current step target is met, and adaptively selects tutoring actions. The plan, step-level progress, inferred learner states, and dialogue history are maintained in memory to support coherent multi-turn guidance. Experiments on multi-turn math tutoring benchmarks demonstrate that ScaffoldLM substantially improves pedagogical tutoring quality over strong baselines. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/BNU-ERC-ITEA/ScaffoldLM.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zechen Li Google, Baiyu Chen University of New South Wales, Hao Xue The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Flora D. Salim
Motion sensor time-series are central to Human Activity Recognition (HAR), yet conventional approaches are constrained to fixed activity sets and typically require costly parameter retraining to adapt to new behaviors. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising open-set reasoning capabilities, applying them directly to numerical time-series often leads to hallucinations and weak grounding. To address this challenge, we propose ZARA (Zero-training Activity Reasoning Agents), a knowledge- and retrieval-augmented agentic framework for motion time-series reasoning in a training-free inference setting. Rather than relying on black-box projections, ZARA distills reference data into a statistically grounded textual knowledge base that transforms implicit signal patterns into verifiable natural-language priors. Guided by retrieved evidence, ZARA iteratively selects discriminative cues and performs grounded reasoning over candidate activities. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks show that ZARA generalizes robustly to unseen subjects and across datasets, demonstrating strong transferability across heterogeneous sensor domains. These results mark a step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion understanding beyond dataset-specific artifacts. Our code is available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表