Cross-Domain User Memory Transfer for Adaptive Large Language Model Applications

Authors

  • Sean Rood Department of Computer Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA. Author
  • Segar Wankataraman Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. Author

Keywords:

large language models, user memory, cross-domain transfer, adaptive systems, governance, fairness, privacy, sociotechnical infrastructure

Abstract

Large language model applications increasingly operate as adaptive sociotechnical services that infer user intent, retrieve contextual knowledge, and shape digital experiences across multiple domains. However, most current systems remain stateless with respect to durable user histories or confine personalization within narrow application boundaries. This paper examines cross-domain user memory transfer as an infrastructure-level challenge involving the extraction, representation, consolidation, retrieval, and governance of user-specific knowledge that can be reused across heterogeneous application contexts. The analysis focuses on structural trade-offs rather than on algorithmic fine-tuning alone. It discusses architectural separation between local sensing, remote inference, and policy enforcement, and it examines representational choices such as natural language memory, embedding-based profiles, and structured user models. The paper further addresses privacy, consent, fairness, robustness, and operational sustainability as first-order design constraints rather than as downstream compliance concerns. Cross-domain transfer can improve longitudinal coherence and reduce repetitive user effort, but it also creates new risks of contextual collapse, biased generalization, and heightened surveillance. A central argument is that memory systems must be governed as active institutional infrastructures with provenance, auditability, deletion rights, and domain-specific oversight. The paper develops this argument through conceptual analysis, architectural discussion, and cross-sectoral comparison, concluding with policy implications and a forward-looking research agenda for memory-aware large language model systems.

References

1. Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., Bernstein, M. S., Bohg, J., Bosselut, A., Brunskill, E., Brynjolfsson, E., Buch, S., Card, D., Castellon, R., Chatterji, N., Chen, A., Creel, K., Davis, J., Demszky, D., ... Liang, P. (2021). On the opportunities and risks of foundation models. arXiv:2108.07258.

2. Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., Mishkin, P., Zhang, C., Agarwal, S., Slama, K., Ray, A., Schulman, J., Hilton, J., Kelton, F., Miller, L., Simens, M., Askell, A., Welinder, P., Christiano, P., Leike, J., & Lowe, R. (2022). Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35, 27730-27744.

3. Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 9459-9474.

4. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 610-623). ACM.

5. Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.

6. Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., Agarwal, S., Herbert-Voss, A., Krueger, G., Henighan, T., Child, R., Ramesh, A., Ziegler, D. M., Wu, J., Winter, C., ... Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877-1901.

7. Wei, J., Tay, Y., Bommasani, R., Raffel, C., Zoph, B., Borgeaud, S., Yogatama, D., Bosma, M., Zhou, D., Metzler, D., Chi, E. H., Hashimoto, T., Vinyals, O., Liang, P., Dean, J., & Fedus, W. (2022). Emergent abilities of large language models. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

8. Mehrabi, N., Morstatter, F., Saxena, N., Lerman, K., & Galstyan, A. (2021). A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys, 54(6), Article 115.

9. Barocas, S., Hardt, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Fairness and machine learning: Limitations and opportunities. MIT Press.

10. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

11. Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (pp. 4171-4186). Association for Computational Linguistics.

12. Shokri, R., Stronati, M., Song, C., & Shmatikov, V. (2017). Membership inference attacks against machine learning models. In 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (pp. 3-18). IEEE.

13. Yu, X. (2026). Enhancing Search Efficiency through LLM-Based User Memory Systems for Query Matching and Intent Modeling.

14. Abadi, M., Chu, A., Goodfellow, I., McMahan, H. B., Mironov, I., Talwar, K., & Zhang, L. (2016). Deep learning with differential privacy. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 308-318). ACM.

15. McMahan, B., Moore, E., Ramage, D., Hampson, S., & Agüera y Arcas, B. (2017). Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) (pp. 1273-1282). PMLR.

16. Hardt, M., Price, E., & Srebro, N. (2016). Equality of opportunity in supervised learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 29.

17. Selbst, A. D., Boyd, D., Friedler, S. A., Venkatasubramanian, S., & Vertesi, J. (2019). Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 59-68). ACM.

18. Zhou, C., Liu, P., Xu, P., Iyer, S., Sun, J., Mao, Y., Ma, X., Efrat, A., Yu, P., Yu, L., Zhang, S., Ghosh, G., Lewis, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Levy, O. (2022). Scaling instruction-finetuned language models. arXiv:2210.11416.

Downloads

Published

2026-07-22

How to Cite

Cross-Domain User Memory Transfer for Adaptive Large Language Model Applications. (2026). Journal of Advanced Artificial Intelligence Research, 5(1). https://www.jaair.org/index.php/home/article/view/224