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Hierarchical Memory
Multi-level memory structure with different retention policies
In 30 seconds
- What
- Organizes agent memory into tiers with different retention rules, automatically moving items between levels based on importance and access patterns.
- When to use
- Long-running agents handling thousands of interactions where keeping everything in active memory becomes too slow or expensive.
- Watch out
- Promotion and demotion logic can silently lose critical context if importance scoring misses what actually matters for your tasks.
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Hierarchical Memory: Overview
Multi-level memory structure with different retention policies
- Multi-tier storage
- Importance-based retention
- Automatic promotion/demotion
- Efficient retrieval
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References
The papers, specifications, and repositories this pattern is based on.
- Memory Hierarchies in Computer Architecture (Hennessy & Patterson, 2019)
- Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (Memory Hierarchy)
- Modern Operating Systems: Memory Management (Tanenbaum, 2014)
- Database System Concepts: Storage and File Structure
- LangChain: Memory Systems with Hierarchical Storage
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