Gated Memory: Admission-Controlled Memory Formation for Conversational AI

Preeti Saraswat, Divya Neelagiri, Ajay Manoj

Personalized conversational AI relies on long-term memory systems that extract facts from user utterances and store them in persistent vector stores. Despite progress in retrieval, deduplication, and lifecycle management, the formation stage, the moment a fact is first written to storage has received almost no principled attention. We identify this as the binding constraint on memory quality in production systems. Critical contextual signals, such as the distinction between a permanent user attribute and a transient situation, exist only in the original utterance and are irreversibly lost the moment extraction produces a subject-relation-object triple. No downstream process can recover them. We propose Gated Memory, a lightweight, modular formation framework that interposes two decision checkpoints between conversation and storage: an admission gate that evaluates every candidate fact against the full utterance context before extraction runs, and a conditional enrichment stage that grounds admitted facts through an entity scope taxonomy with privacy constraints. The gate evaluates only the current exchange while using prior turns as read-only reference context, and produces a…