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Memory Retrieval Strategies

Master how AI agents retrieve relevant memories to support intelligent decision-making and personalized responses

Optimization & Fine-Tuning

Beyond basic retrieval and ranking, advanced techniques help optimize memory retrieval for speed, quality, and cost. These strategies balance trade-offs between recall (finding all relevant memories) and precision (avoiding irrelevant ones).

Interactive: Top-K & Threshold Tuning

Adjust parameters to see how they affect retrieved memories:

5
18
0.70
0.500.95
Retrieved 5 memories (out of 8 candidates):

User deployed ML model to production

0.92

Discussed model evaluation metrics

0.88

Reviewed deployment best practices

0.85

Compared cloud providers for hosting

0.78

Troubleshooting API latency issues

0.75
Top-K: Limits max results. Low K saves tokens but may miss relevant context. High K provides more context but increases cost.
Threshold: Filters low-quality results. High threshold ensures precision but may miss edge cases. Low threshold improves recall.

🚀 Advanced Optimization Techniques

🔄Query Expansion

Generate multiple reformulations of the query using LLM or synonyms to improve recall.

Original: "fix bug" → Expanded: ["debug issue", "resolve error", "troubleshoot problem"]

📦Hierarchical Retrieval

Retrieve at multiple levels: documents → sections → chunks. Enables context-aware retrieval.

Project Report → Section 3: Results → Paragraph 2: Key Findings

🎭Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE)

Generate hypothetical answer to query, embed it, then search for similar memories. Improves semantic match.

Query: "ML deployment" → HyDE: "Deploy model using Docker and AWS ECS..." → Search

Caching & Memoization

Cache recent queries and results. If similar query arrives, return cached results instantly.

Cache key: hash(query + topK + threshold) → TTL: 5 minutes

⚡ Performance Optimization

🗜️

Compression

Use Product Quantization or Scalar Quantization to reduce vector storage size by 8-16x with minimal accuracy loss.

⚖️

Load Balancing

Distribute queries across multiple vector DB instances. Use consistent hashing for efficient shard routing.

🎯

Index Tuning

Adjust HNSW parameters: M (connections per node) and efConstruction (build quality) for speed vs accuracy.

📊

Batch Processing

Batch multiple queries together for embedding generation and search to maximize GPU/CPU utilization.

✅ Retrieval Best Practices

Monitor Latency: Track P50, P95, P99 retrieval times. Optimize slow queries with profiling and index tuning.
A/B Test Strategies: Compare different retrieval methods, ranking weights, and thresholds with real user queries.
Feedback Loop: Use implicit feedback (user clicks, follow-up questions) to improve ranking over time.
Graceful Degradation: If retrieval fails or times out, fall back to recent conversation history rather than failing completely.
Context Window Management: Balance memory retrieval with system prompts and conversation history to avoid token limit issues.
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