English

SwiftMem: Fast Agentic Memory via Query-aware Indexing

Computation and Language 2026-01-14 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Agentic memory systems have become critical for enabling LLM agents to maintain long-term context and retrieve relevant information efficiently. However, existing memory frameworks suffer from a fundamental limitation: they perform exhaustive retrieval across the entire storage layer regardless of query characteristics. This brute-force approach creates severe latency bottlenecks as memory grows, hindering real-time agent interactions. We propose SwiftMem, a query-aware agentic memory system that achieves sub-linear retrieval through specialized indexing over temporal and semantic dimensions. Our temporal index enables logarithmic-time range queries for time-sensitive retrieval, while the semantic DAG-Tag index maps queries to relevant topics through hierarchical tag structures. To address memory fragmentation during growth, we introduce an embedding-tag co-consolidation mechanism that reorganizes storage based on semantic clusters to improve cache locality. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval benchmarks demonstrate that SwiftMem achieves 47×\times faster search compared to state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining competitive accuracy, enabling practical deployment of memory-augmented LLM agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.08160,
  title  = {SwiftMem: Fast Agentic Memory via Query-aware Indexing},
  author = {Anxin Tian and Yiming Li and Xing Li and Hui-Ling Zhen and Lei Chen and Xianzhi Yu and Zhenhua Dong and Mingxuan Yuan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08160},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:02:01.407Z