Beyond RAG for Agent Memory: Retrieval by Decoupling and Aggregation

arXiv:2602.02007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent memory systems often adopt the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, yet its underlying assumptions differ in this setting. RAG targets large, heterogeneous corpora where retrieved passages are diverse, whereas agent memory is a bounded, coherent dialogue stream with highly correlated spans that are often duplicates. Under this shift, fixed top-$k$ similarity retrieval tends to return redundant context, and post-ho