Catalog Systems Theoretical / informal — ideas without a paper Four-Type Agent Memory Taxonomy

Four-Type Agent Memory Taxonomy

https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-06-23-agent/

"Agent = LLM + memory + planning + tools." Maps cognitive memory types to LLM machinery: sensory (learned embeddings), short-term / in-context (the context window), long-term (external vector store with fast retrieval). The first widely-cited taxonomy mapping human memory science onto LLM agent architecture.

Active · Verified 2026-10-23 · fresh as of 2026-10-23 · 12 cited facts, 0 with a third-party source · Suggest a correction

At a glance

Type
Cognitive-science → LLM mapping vendor fix
Tier
T5
Section
Theoretical / informal — ideas without a paper
Created
2023-09 (CoALA, 'Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents', arxiv 2309.02427 submitted 5 September 2023 by Sumers, Yao, Narasimhan and Griffiths) paper fix
Latest release
not applicable — not OSS fix
License
not applicable — not OSS fix
GitHub
not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
Pricing
not applicable — not commercial fix
Funding
not applicable — not commercial fix
Freshness
2026-10-23 fix
Layer
agent-infra repo fix

Memory taxonomy

storage
vector
retrieval
similarity
persistence
long-term
update
n/a
unit
chunk
governance
n/a
conflict
out-of-scope

When to use

Optimised for: not applicable - theoretical / not a system

Anti-fit: not applicable - theoretical / not a system

Pros & cons

Pros

First widely-cited taxonomy mapping cognitive memory types to LLM machinery; adopted (often uncited) across the agent-framework field.

Cons

Blog post; taxonomy is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Claims & capabilities

Lilian Weng (VP Research, OpenAI), June 2023 blog. Adopted (often uncited) by LangChain, AutoGPT, and most subsequent agent frameworks.

Technical surface

API surface
not applicable — theoretical / not a system
Backend storage
not applicable — theoretical / not a system
Deployment
not applicable — not a deployable product
Embedding model
not applicable — theoretical / not a system
Multi-tenancy
not applicable — theoretical / not a system
MCP
not applicable — theoretical / informal idea
A2A
not applicable — theoretical / informal idea
OpenTelemetry
not applicable — theoretical / informal idea

Similar systems

Other theoretical / informal — ideas without a paper in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.

  • From Human Memory to AI Memory (survey) T4

    Eight-quadrant classification grid across personal/system, parametric/non-parametric, and short-term/long-term axes. Bridges cognitive-science memory taxonomy to LLM architecture choices, less common than purely engineering-oriented surveys. v2 revision April 23, 2025.

  • Context Engineering T5

    "+1 for 'context engineering' over 'prompt engineering' … the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step." The LLM is "a coworker with anterograde amnesia" — cannot consolidate or build long-running knowledge once training ends.

  • Context Engineering — naming event T5

    Endorses "context engineering" as a distinct discipline from prompt engineering — what agents do with their context window (routing, compression, tool output formatting, memory retrieval injection) is engineering, not just prompting.

  • Context Expansion Law T5

    "Application context tends to expand to fill the context limits supported by the model." Treats agent memory as a first-class unresolved design problem rather than a solved component; explicitly defers a memory deep-dive to a future post.

  • Externalization in LLM Agents T4

    Traces the shift from weights-as-capability to harness-as-capability; analyzes memory, skills, and protocols as three coupled forms of externalization and examines how they interact. Memory is defined as the externalization of state across time. Covers self-evolving harnesses and shared agent infrastructure as emerging directions. April 9, 2026.

  • Files Are All You Need T5

    Coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor) converge on the filesystem as their primary memory abstraction: conversation histories as searchable files, skills as files, retrieval via file search rather than vector DBs. Argument: LLMs are fluent with filesystem concepts, so the filesystem is the right interface even if storage underneath is a database.

Sources (11 cited facts, 0 third-party)

Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).