Remember What Matters

Public paper repository for:

Remember What Matters: State-Conditioned Episodic Retrieval for Emotional AI Companions

Author: Nikita Shilov, nik@zbs.gg

Claim

The paper studies a narrow retrieval primitive for emotional AI companions: the same user query may need different remembered episodes depending on the user's current emotional or contextual state.

For a quick non-specialist summary, read ONE_PAGER.md.

The current evidence is deliberately scoped:

• Pulse does not improve general retrieval overall on the primary n=100 deterministic suite.
• The supported result is stateful Recall@3 under a single-user deployment regression protocol: Pulse 0.419 vs. cosine_state 0.314 and hybrid_state 0.219.
• The study is an engineering case study and regression artifact, not a cross-user benchmark or broad memory-system superiority claim.

Public Contents

This repository contains the public paper surface:

paper.tex
paper.pdf
ONE_PAGER.md
references.bib
REFERENCE_AUDIT.md
scripts/verify_bib_urls.py
docs/companion_memory_comparison_plan.md
PUBLICATION_NOTE.md
LICENSE

Privacy Boundary

This public repository intentionally excludes:

• the private deployment corpus;
• raw or semi-raw companion logs;
• raw Apple Health exports;
• the actual Cartographer profile;
• raw judge notes and closed-review verdict artifacts;
• closed-review bundles and old arXiv/review zip/tar artifacts.

The closed-review verification packet can be shared privately with trusted reviewers. A public replication packet requires a separate redaction/privacy pass.

Build

tectonic --keep-logs --keep-intermediates paper.tex

The generated paper.pdf in this repository is built from paper.tex.

Verify References

The public repository can verify bibliography hygiene without the private benchmark corpus:

make verify-refs

This checks cited arXiv, DOI, and URL targets and fails on missing references or title mismatches. REFERENCE_AUDIT.md records the last successful online reference audit.

The numerical claim verifier from the closed-review bundle is not included here because it depends on private/redacted benchmark artifacts.

License

The manuscript and accompanying text (paper.tex, paper.pdf, ONE_PAGER.md, references.bib, REFERENCE_AUDIT.md, docs/) are © 2026 Nikita Shilov and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). See LICENSE. You may share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes with attribution.

The helper code under scripts/ is additionally available under the MIT license.

The Pulse retrieval engine is licensed separately in its own repository: https://github.com/zbs-gg/pulse (AGPL-3.0, with commercial terms available).