Source

arXiv:2603.15642 — "CraniMem: Cranial Inspired Gated and Bounded Memory for Agentic Systems" (submitted March 3, 2026)

Key Contribution

Dual-store architecture: episodic buffer + long-term knowledge graph. A goal-conditioned utility gate controls writes (only high-utility items enter long-term storage); scheduled consolidation replays high-value traces into the knowledge graph while pruning low-utility items. Prevents unbounded memory growth. Outperforms Vanilla RAG and Mem0 baselines with improved noise robustness.

Relevance to Zeph

zeph-memory — MAGMA already has episodic + semantic layers, but lacks the explicit goal-conditioned utility scoring that CraniMem uses to decide what enters long-term storage. The consolidation scheduler in crates/zeph-memory/src/consolidation.rs runs on cosine similarity threshold alone; CraniMem's utility gate adds a goal-relevance dimension.

Distinct from:

• TiMem (research(memory): TiMem temporal-hierarchical memory tree — complexity-aware recall, no over-summarization (arXiv:2601.02845) #2262) — temporal tree for time-aware retrieval
• SleepGate (research(memory): SleepGate scheduled forgetting pass — O(log n) interference horizon for long-running agents (arXiv:2603.14517) #2397) — scheduled forgetting sweep for interference pruning
• A-MAC (graph: entity extractor creates self-loop edges (source == target) #2215) — admission control for write prevention (similarity-based)

CraniMem's utility gate is orthogonal: it scores writes against the current conversational goal, not just similarity.

Implementation Sketch

• Add optional goal_conditioned_write flag to [memory.admission] config
• At write time, embed current task goal + candidate memory; compute utility score
• Only promote to long-term store (SQLite + vector index) if utility > threshold
• Reuse consolidation.rs sweep timer for goal-relevance pruning pass

Priority Assessment

P3 (research) — Strong complement to existing A-MAC and consolidation. Consider implementing alongside next memory architecture iteration.