Skip to main content

Memory consolidation and retention

Parent concept​

Scope​

This page describes how Tyrum keeps durable memory bounded and auditable over time. It covers consolidation, budgets, forgetting, and tombstones rather than the higher-level purpose of memory.

Automatic pre-compaction flush​

When a session is close to auto-compaction, Tyrum can trigger a silent turn that reminds the agent to write durable memory before older context is summarized away. In many cases the correct behavior is to record memory and produce no user-visible reply.

Consolidation model​

Consolidation converts episodic records into reusable semantic or procedural memory and keeps the whole system bounded.

Key properties:

  • consolidation runs when budgets are exceeded
  • compression is preferred over deletion
  • duplicate facts and notes are merged before lower-value content is evicted
  • WorkBoard outcomes can be promoted into memory when they become durable lessons or facts

Budgets and enforcement​

Forgetting is driven by budgets, not by wall-clock time.

Budgets may be expressed as:

  • maximum bytes or characters of note text
  • maximum item count by kind
  • maximum embedding or vector footprint
  • maximum episodic detail retained before summaries replace raw payloads

Timestamps may be used as tie-breakers, but not as TTL-based deletion triggers.

When over budget, apply the least-destructive steps first:

  1. deduplicate and merge
  2. summarize or compress high-volume episodic material
  3. drop or downsample derived indexes
  4. evict low-utility canonical items while preserving tombstones

Forgetting and tombstones​

Tyrum supports explicit forgetting by stable id or by selectors such as kind, key, tag, or provenance.

For auditability, forgetting produces tombstones:

  • tombstones preserve stable ids and minimal metadata
  • tombstones support deletion proof and compliance workflows
  • tombstones remain bounded, but should survive long enough to meet audit policy

Safety and operator control​

  • secrets must never be persisted into memory
  • memory administration remains provider-defined and policy-gated
  • retrieval must not bypass approvals or policy decisions
  • all memory operations should remain observable through events and audit logs