Memory in AI Agents: Short-Term, Long-Term, and Episodic
Memory allows AI agents to retain context, learn from experience, and behave coherently across sessions. There are typically three types of memory systems in modern agents:
Short-term memory holds information during a session—like a conversation buffer.
Long-term memory stores facts or learned patterns across many sessions.
Episodic memory records structured experiences for later retrieval, similar to how humans remember events.
LLM-based agents increasingly rely on memory augmentation strategies—vector databases for recall, memory pruning for relevance, and embedding-based retrieval.
Understanding when and how to use memory modules is crucial for building scalable, context-aware agents. Dive into examples on the AI agents service page.
Memory without context ranking can degrade performance—always include relevance scoring or recency weighting.