ShardMemo: Scope-Before-Routing for Agentic Memory Retrieval
TL;DR
SHARD-MEMO is presented, an agentic memory system built on scope-before-routing: metadata predicates first identify the admissible shards, and a learned router then selects a small number of them for shard-local approximate nearest neighbor retrieval, separating hard admissibility from learned relevance ranking.
Abstract
Agentic systems accumulate persistent memory across sessions, tools, and tasks, and a later request must retrieve from it under two distinct constraints: which memories it is permitted to access, and which are relevant under a limited search budget. Existing memory systems handle access scope in two flawed ways: applying scope after retrieval wastes probe budget on inadmissible memories, while treating scope as a learned ranking feature makes a hard constraint depend on router quality. We present SHARD-MEMO, an agentic memory system built on scope-before-routing: metadata predicates first identify the admissible shards, and a learned router then selects a small number of them for shard-local approximate nearest neighbor retrieval. Given the supplied scope predicate and metadata, this separates hard admissibility from learned relevance ranking, so inadmissible shards cannot consume shard-probe budget. We evaluate on LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and ToolBench, covering conversational, long-context, and procedural memory. Under matched supervision and fixed budgets, SHARDMEMO improves over a learned router baseline by roughly +3 F1 on LoCoMo; in end-to-end LoCoMo evaluation it improves over the strongest evaluated memory baseline by up to +6.8 F1, with gains on HotpotQA and ToolBench.
