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MemOS: A Memory OS for AI System (arxiv.org)
3 points by handfuloflight on Jul 9, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: It gives AI a memory manager: each memory is a unit holding knowledge plus its source and version, and can move between text, active context, and stored weights. Unlike fixed weights or plain-text lookup, this keeps knowledge updatable and personal over time at lower cost.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an essential infrastructure for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), yet their lack of well-defined memory management systems hinders the development of long-context reasoning, continual personalization, and knowledge consistency.Existing models mainly rely on static parameters and short-lived contextual states, limiting their ability to track user preferences or update knowledge over extended periods.While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces external knowledge in plain text, it remains a stateless workaround without lifecycle control or integration with persistent representations.Recent work has modeled the training and inference cost of LLMs from a memory hierarchy perspective, showing that introducing an explicit memory layer between parameter memory and external retrieval can substantially reduce these costs by externalizing specific knowledge. Beyond computational efficiency, LLMs face broader challenges arising from how information is distributed over time and context, requiring systems capable of managing heterogeneous knowledge spanning different temporal scales and sources. To address this challenge, we propose MemOS, a memory operating system that treats memory as a manageable system resource. It unifies the representation, scheduling, and evolution of plaintext, activation-based, and parameter-level memories, enabling cost-efficient storage and retrieval. As the basic unit, a MemCube encapsulates both memory content and metadata such as provenance and versioning. MemCubes can be composed, migrated, and fused over time, enabling flexible transitions between memory types and bridging retrieval with parameter-based learning. MemOS establishes a memory-centric system framework that brings controllability, plasticity, and evolvability to LLMs, laying the foundation for continual learning and personalized modeling.

Zhiyu Li, Chenyang Xi, Chunyu Li, Ding Chen, Boyu Chen, Shichao Song, Simin Niu, Hanyu Wang, Jiawei Yang, Chen Tang, Qingchen Yu, Jihao Zhao, et al.
arXiv:2507.03724 · cs.CL · submitted Jul 4, 2025 · updated Dec 3, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 36 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables

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Also discussed: Jul 2025 (2 points, 0 comments)

An interesting idea, but I'm surprised that they only mention MemGPT/Letta [0] in passing; from what I've seen of Letta's work and e.g. their recent paper on "sleep-time compute", they are really pushing this space forward.

[0] https://www.letta.com/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13171

... this looks incredible. Thank you for sharing.