MemCode: Discrete Semantic Representations for Long-Term Agent Memory

Xin Li, Liang Hu, Duoqian Miao, Ming Peng, Qi Zhang

Long-term memory remains a fundamental bottleneck for large language model (LLM) agents across sessions. Existing systems typically adopt a write-then-retrieve paradigm, storing context-dependent dialogue fragments and retrieving them via nearest-neighbor search in a continuous embedding space. This design yields unstable access units and systematically misses logically related but lexically distant evidence. We propose MemCode, a long-term agent memory framework that couples retrieval-oriented writing with discrete associative retrieval. MemCode rewrites dialogue into self-contained atomic memory units (AMUs), maps AMUs into a learnable codebook with isomorphic semantic quantization (ISQ), and uses codebook co-occurrence topology as a retrieval path complementary to vector search. For long-term memory stores, MemCode separates online atomic writes from asynchronous offline consolidation. On LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with GPT-4o-mini and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 backbones, MemCode achieves the best overall accuracy while keeping per-dialogue memory construction within roughly 40~130 seconds, making it 3~21 times faster than LightMem and over an order of magnitude faster than…