MemForest: An Efficient Agent Memory System with Hierarchical Temporal Indexing

Abstract

Memory is a fundamental component for long-context LLM agents, supporting persistent state across interactions through a continuous serve-and-update lifecycle. Despite substantial prior work, many stateful systems retain sequential autoregressive extraction or state-dependent maintenance on the write path, delaying when new evidence becomes queryable. To address these challenges, we present MemForest, a memory framework that reformulates agent memory as a write-efficient temporal data-management problem. MemForest breaks the sequential bottleneck via parallel extraction, decoupling memory construction into concurrent, independent operations. We further introduce MemTree, a hierarchical temporal index that organizes memory as time-ordered trees and replaces global rewrites with localized dirty-path refresh. Dirty summaries can be refreshed in parallel across nodes and trees. End-to-end work remains proportional to incoming content; the logarithmic bound applies only to structural insertion and level-dependent refresh depth in balanced trees. We evaluate MemForest on two long-context benchmarks, LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo. Experiments use Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-30B, and Gemma-4-12B-IT. With Qwen3-30B, MemForest reaches 81.8 percent pass at 1 on LongMemEval-S, while its input-normalized build rate is 6.0 times that of EverMemOS. On LoCoMo categories 1 to 4, it reaches 84.09 percent, within 0.13 percentage points of EverMemOS; on a matched conversation, its build rate is 9.5 times higher. These results show that MemForest reduces memory-freshness latency while retaining strong answer quality.