Memory and State Management

Memory and State Management

Episodic Memory — References

Episodic memory › References

20 of 69 in this book · 2 min read

The distinction this capability is named for, and the agent architectures that implement an occasion-indexed store.

The distinction

  • Episodic and Semantic Memory — Endel Tulving, in Organization of Memory, edited by Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson, Academic Press, 1972. The chapter that introduced the separation between memory for experienced occasions and memory for decontextualised knowledge. Cited by name.
  • Elements of Episodic Memory — Endel Tulving, Oxford University Press, 1983. The extended treatment, including the argument that an episodic record is defined by its retained temporal and contextual reference. Cited by name.

Occasion-indexed memory in agents

  • Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior — Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie J. Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang and Michael S. Bernstein, ACM UIST, 2023. Describes an append-only stream of timestamped observations as the substrate for agent behaviour, with retrieval over it combining recency, importance, and relevance. Cited by name.
  • Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents — Theodore R. Sumers, Shunyu Yao, Karthik Narasimhan and Thomas L. Griffiths, Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2024 (arXiv:2309.02427). Places an episodic store alongside semantic and procedural stores in a language-agent architecture. Cited by name.

Recording occasions as a system concern

  • OpenTelemetry Specification — the data model for spans and events, including the separation of start and end times, status, and attributes. Useful as a worked design for recording an occasion with a terminal outcome, and as a warning about what sampling removes.
  • Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System — Leslie Lamport, Communications of the ACM, 1978. Why the order in which records arrive is not the order in which events happened. Cited by name.

No verified reference is recorded for episode granularity selection or for annotation schemes over immutable agent episodes. Both are practice without published study.