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HaluMem: Evaluating Hallucinations in Memory Systems of Agents (arxiv.org)
2 points by timini 331 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A new test checks an agent's memory step by step—storing facts, updating them, and answering questions—using very long chats, not just grading answers. Most memory systems make and pile up mistakes while storing and updating, and those errors leak into their answers.

Abstract

Memory systems are key components that enable AI systems such as LLMs and AI agents to achieve long-term learning and sustained interaction. However, during memory storage and retrieval, these systems frequently exhibit memory hallucinations, including fabrication, errors, conflicts, and omissions. Existing evaluations of memory hallucinations are primarily end-to-end question answering, which makes it difficult to localize the operational stage within the memory system where hallucinations arise. To address this, we introduce the Hallucination in Memory Benchmark (HaluMem), the first operation level hallucination evaluation benchmark tailored to memory systems. HaluMem defines three evaluation tasks (memory extraction, memory updating, and memory question answering) to comprehensively reveal hallucination behaviors across different operational stages of interaction. To support evaluation, we construct user-centric, multi-turn human-AI interaction datasets, HaluMem-Medium and HaluMem-Long. Both include about 15k memory points and 3.5k multi-type questions. The average dialogue length per user reaches 1.5k and 2.6k turns, with context lengths exceeding 1M tokens, enabling evaluation of hallucinations across different context scales and task complexities. Empirical studies based on HaluMem show that existing memory systems tend to generate and accumulate hallucinations during the extraction and updating stages, which subsequently propagate errors to the question answering stage. Future research should focus on developing interpretable and constrained memory operation mechanisms that systematically suppress hallucinations and improve memory reliability.

Ding Chen, Simin Niu, Kehang Li, Peng Liu, Xiangping Zheng, Bo Tang, Xinchi Li, Feiyu Xiong, Zhiyu Li
arXiv:2511.03506 · cs.CL · submitted Nov 5, 2025 · updated Jan 5, 2026
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HaluMem introduces the first benchmark for evaluating hallucinations in agent memory systems at the operation level. Through three evaluation tasks (memory extraction, updating, and question answering), it reveals that existing memory systems generate and accumulate hallucinations during early stages, which then propagate errors downstream. The benchmark uses two datasets spanning different context scales to systematically reveal these failure modes.