Adaptive Focus Memory for Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-turn dialogue settings, yet their behavior remains bottlenecked by naive history management strategies. Replaying the full conversation at every turn is simple but costly, while recency-based truncation or static summarization often causes early, high-impact user constraints to drift out of effective context. As a result, models may retain text without reliably applying it when it matters. We present Adaptive Focus Memory (AFM), a lightweight context management system that dynamically assigns each past message one of three fidelity levels: Full, Compressed, or Placeholder, based on semantic relevance, temporal decay, and importance classification. AFM packs messages chronologically under a fixed token budget, preserving critical constraints at high fidelity while allowing low-importance context to degrade gracefully. We evaluate AFM on two multi-turn dialogue benchmarks designed to stress long-horizon constraint preservation: a safety-critical travel scenario involving a user with a severe peanut allergy, and a policy-critical tax compliance scenario involving an illegal evasion request. Under strict grading that requires both explicit constraint recall and appropriately conditioned generation, AFM succeeds in 83.3 percent of allergy runs where all baseline strategies fail, and preserves correct refusal behavior on the tax benchmark. These results demonstrate that effective dialogue memory requires more than retaining prior text. Selectively allocating fidelity across past messages enables reliable constraint preservation under bounded context growth, without modifying model weights or introducing external retrieval infrastructure. We release an open-source implementation of AFM compatible with OpenAI-style chat APIs to support reproducible research and practical deployment.