Paper Detail

ZifaMem: Structured Memory for Persona, Preference, and Emotional Continuity in AI Companions

Jingzhe Fang, Guozhi Xu, Yunfan Cui, Xiaochen Yang, Zhangyu Hua

arxiv Score 15.8

Published 2026-07-20 · First seen 2026-07-21

General AI

Abstract

AI companions are judged not only by single-turn fluency but by whether they sustain emotional continuity: remembering who the companion is, what the user prefers, and how the relationship has felt. We present ZifaMem, a structured memory system that organizes dialogue into session summaries, episodic memories, and a consolidated user model. Against a deployment-honest comparator that supplies the full raw dialogue history, and under a fixed LLM-as-a-judge protocol with route audits, structured memory raises pooled four-backbone emotional-intelligence scores by 11.4% (95% CI 6.3% to 17.1%), and persona grounding improves on all four backbones (Claude +42% relative). Multi-turn affect context wins a +39% net preference over a single-turn snapshot (exploratory), whereas an additional emotion state machine yields no measurable gain on any of five endpoints. Under an identical preregistered protocol, three memory systems (ZifaMem, Mem0, and filtered verbatim retrieval) each improve significantly over raw-history deployment, and ZifaMem and Mem0 are statistically equivalent within +/-5 points on the preregistered primary preference endpoint. The ZifaMem SDK, CLI, and portable Agent Skills are open-sourced at https://github.com/zifacorp/zifamem.

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BibTeX

@article{fang2026zifamem,
  title = {ZifaMem: Structured Memory for Persona, Preference, and Emotional Continuity in AI Companions},
  author = {Jingzhe Fang and Guozhi Xu and Yunfan Cui and Xiaochen Yang and Zhangyu Hua},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {AI companions are judged not only by single-turn fluency but by whether they sustain emotional continuity: remembering who the companion is, what the user prefers, and how the relationship has felt. We present ZifaMem, a structured memory system that organizes dialogue into session summaries, episodic memories, and a consolidated user model. Against a deployment-honest comparator that supplies the full raw dialogue history, and under a fixed LLM-as-a-judge protocol with route audits, structured },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17564},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2607.17564},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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