LLM Memory Architectures: A Taxonomy

LLM Memory Architectures: A Taxonomy

v1.0 | 2026-07-31 | Status: Draft

Overview

Large Language Models don’t have memory in the human sense, but we can build memory systems around them. The current landscape of approaches falls into roughly five categories, ordered by distance from the model’s native operation:

1. In-Context Memory

Definition: Memory that fits entirely within the model’s context window.

Mechanisms:

• Direct prompt injection
• Chain-of-thought with history
• Few-shot examples as memory

Limitations:

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