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COMPEL Glossary / episodic-memory

Episodic memory

A form of long-term memory that recalls events from past sessions — "what happened when I ran last Tuesday" — analogous to human episodic memory.

What this means in practice

Used in research agents and long-horizon agents; governance concerns include retention and privacy because episodic memory can encode sensitive session history.

Synonyms

agent episodic memory , event-history memory

See also

  • Long-term memory — Persistent memory — typically implemented as a vector store — that survives across agent sessions.
  • Semantic memory — Structured knowledge — typically a knowledge graph or ontology — that the agent can query for general facts rather than session-specific history.
  • Agent memory — The stored context, preferences, observations, and state an agent accumulates across turns or sessions.