SUMMARY
We analyze the emergence of Kovacs-like memory effects in athermal systems within the linear response regime. This is done by starting from both the master equation for the probability distribution and the equations for the physically-relevant moments. The general results are applied to a general class of models with conserved momentum and non-conserved energy. Our theoretical predictions, obtained within the first Sonine approximation, show an excellent agreement with the numerical results. Furthermore, we prove that the observed non-monotonic relaxation is consistent with the monotonic decay of the non-equilibrium entropy.