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arXiv · 2610.24672

MemRevise: A Self-Revising Memory for Conversational Search

Mohammed Ali·Abdelrahman Abdallah·Adam Jatowt
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Abstract

In conversational search, users correct misun-derstandings, revise their requests and return to earlier topics, so part of the history no longer reflects what they want. Existing benchmarks do not isolate such turns. Current search methods either re-read the history or keep a record of every turn, and none of them marks earlier content as dropped. We introduce CONVREVISE, a benchmark of 4,429 test questions in six tiers of returns and revisions over TopiOCQA, CORAL and OR-QuAC. We also propose MEMREVISE, which combines a revisable memory graph, a 3B writer distilled from teacher memories, and a search guided by the memory. The writer reads each turn once and adds a node that records its topic, its facts and the operations it performs, such as adding, abandoning or reactivating a topic. Topic status follows from these operations, so a dropped topic keeps its facts and can be restored. With a frozen retriever, MEMREVISE reaches a mean MRR@10 of 0.701, against 0.589 for the best competitor, ConvSearch-R1-FT, and 0.617 for a writer distilled the same way without the memory, so the memory and the steps built on it add 0.084. MEMREVISE is significantly better on Topi- OCQA and OR-QuAC, statistically tied with prompted 32B rewriters on CORAL, and never significantly behind the strongest competitor of any tier.

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Mohammed Ali, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Adam Jatowt. 2026-10-17. MemRevise: A Self-Revising Memory for Conversational Search. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24672

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