SYNAPSE: Empowering LLM Agents with Episodic-Semantic Memory via Spreading Activation
Existing retrieval-augmented approaches struggle to handle the fragmented nature of long-term agent memory and inadequately support complex temporal and multi-hop reasoning tasks. This work proposes a dynamic schematic memory architecture that emulates the spreading activation mechanism from cognitive science, dynamically selecting relevant subgraphs through lateral inhibition and temporal decay to enable synergistic retrieval of semantic and episodic memory. By moving beyond static vector similarity, the model mitigates the “context tunneling” problem and integrates geometric embedding with activation-driven graph traversal to form a tripartite hybrid retrieval strategy. Evaluated on the LoCoMo benchmark, the proposed method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating superior performance in complex reasoning scenarios.