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COMPEL Glossary / long-term-memory

Long-term memory

Persistent memory — typically implemented as a vector store — that survives across agent sessions.

What this means in practice

Long-term memory is the carrier for user-specific context and the attack surface for memory poisoning; governance concerns include retention policy, access control, and deletion on data-subject request.

Synonyms

persistent memory (agent) , agent long-term store

See also

  • Short-term memory — The working context window an agent uses within a single task — prompts, retrievals, tool outputs, intermediate reasoning.
  • 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.
  • Semantic memory — Structured knowledge — typically a knowledge graph or ontology — that the agent can query for general facts rather than session-specific history.