PersistBench: When Should Long-Term Memories Be Forgotten by LLMs? 文章

ArXiv CS.AI2026-06-04NEWSen作者: Sidharth Pulipaka, Oliver Chen, Manas Sharma, Taaha S Bajwa, Vyas Raina, Ivaxi Sheth

摘要

arXiv:2602.01146v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conversational assistants are increasingly integrating long-term memory with large language models (LLMs). This persistence of memories, e.g., the user is vegetarian, can enhance personalization in future conversations. However, the same persistence can also introduce safety risks that have been largely overlooked. Hence, we introduce PersistBench to measure the extent of these safety risks. We identify two long-term memory-specific risks: cross-domain leakage, where LLMs inappropriately inject context from the long-term memories; and memory-induced sycophancy, where stored long-term memories insidiously reinforce user biases. We evaluate 18 frontier and open-source LLMs on our benchmark. Our results reveal a surprisingly high failure rate across these LLMs - a median failure rate of 53% on cross-domain samples and 97% on sycophancy samples.