Conditioning the Write: Semantic Cues for Continual Long-Context Parametric Memory

Continual parametric memory stores source information in model parameters so that questions can be answered without the source text. We study whether the input conditions under which fixed question–answer (QA) targets are written affect later recall. Our method supplies question-derived (QD) cues that describe a question group's shared setting, or evidence-removed (ER) cues that retain source background after designated answer evidence is deleted. Because these cues are unavailable at evaluation, we alternate cued and bare questions while keeping answer supervision and optimizer updates fixed. Across 100 matched LIFT paths, QD and ER improve mean final F1 from 41.54 to 44.81 and 44.70. On ten whole-dialogue LoCoMo writes, compact ER reaches 25.68 F1 using 8.0% of full ER's total training tokens, although full ER has a lower peak drop. An eight-seed study on three fixed scenes shows that cue gains also persist with on-policy context distillation, whose additional benefit depends on the cue. These results support input conditioning for improved recall of written answers.