Structured Belief State and the First Precision-Aware Benchmark for LLM Memory Retrieval

Abstract

Current LLM memory benchmarks evaluate answer quality rather than retrieval accuracy. Consequently, a system that dumps its entire belief store can achieve perfect recall and mask severe precision failures. We show this evaluation gap persists across multiple embedding models where similarity-based retrieval over domain-specific corpora inherently struggles to isolate target beliefs from semantically proximate ones. Furthermore, multi-turn topic drift compounds this retrieval noise while driving up latency and operational costs. To decouple retrieval quality from generative performance, we introduce PrecisionMemBench, an 89-case benchmark measuring precision, noise isolation, session latency, and belief mutability. We also present Tenure, a structured belief-store proxy that resolves scope and retrieval before inference and injects typed belief state as ambient instruction before the model sees the prompt, removing model-side discretion over whether memory is consulted. Evaluated across 13 configurations, Tenure achieves perfect retrieval passes across all active, non-session, and session test cases. In contrast, the baseline configurations fail to reach even half of the active passes, with precision scores clustering at 0.22 and below. Our results demonstrate that while current memory systems successfully store information, they fail to retrieve it cleanly; a structural vulnerability that traditional answer-quality benchmarks conceal.