Memory

We have a simple memory interface to experiment with. Memory is accessible at the Chain level, and only at th Chain level, since it is the only stateful component. By default, memory saves conversation history, including the latest user query, and intermediate steps, which are AgentAction taken with corresponding outputs.

Chain could collect all the memory and puts into inputs at prep_inputs step and updates memory at prep_outputs step. Constructed inputs will be passed to agent as kwargs.

There are two parts of the memory, conversation history and key-value memory

Conversation history

Memory uses ChatMessageHistory to store all the conversation history between agent and user as instances of BaseMessage, including FunctionMessage, which is tool used and corresponding output. This make tracking all interactions easy and fit the same interface OpenAI API requires.

Key-value memory

Not only we could save conversation history, it allows saving any memory in key value pair format. By default, it saves all the AgentActions and corresponding outputs using key value pairs. This part is designed to be flexible and users could save anything to it with preferred storage. One way is using this as long term memory powered by internal search tool. Example implementation of it is under autochain/memory/long_term_memory.py. In that example, if the value is an instance of document, it would be saved to long_term_memory and can be retrieved using key as query.

Types of memory supported

AutoChain supports different types of memory for different use cases.

BufferMemory

This is the simplest implementation of memory. Everything stored in RAM with python dictionary as key-value store. This is best suited for experimentation and iterating prompts, which is the default type of memory AutoChain uses in examples and evaluation.

LongTermMemory

In the case there are a lot of information need to be stored and only a small part of it is needed during the planning step, LongTermMemory enables agents to retrieve partial memory with internal search tool, such as ChromaDBSearch and PineconeSearch. Search query is the key of the store, and it still follow the same interface as other memory implementations. Both would encode the text into vector DB and retrieve using the search query.

RedisMemory

Redis is also supported to save information. This is useful when hosting AutoChain as a backend service on more than one server instance, in which case it's not possible to use RAM as memory.