Evolution & Quality

Evolution Mechanism

Unlike flat memory systems that silently overwrite existing notes, openclaw-amem treats memory as living knowledge that evolves over time.

When new content lands in the 0.72–0.85 cosine similarity zone with an existing note, it is flagged pending_merge=true and routed through an LLM evolution judgment at agent_end instead of being force-merged or silently accepted.

Four evolution paths

Path	When	Action
EVOLVE	New info deepens or updates old memory (e.g. "wants to buy Model 3" → "decided on standard RWD")	Old note content updated, event appended to evolution_history, new note absorbed
CONFLICT	New and old info contradict each other (e.g. "lives in Riverstone" vs "moved to Eastholm")	Both notes kept, both marked conflict: true — preserved for human review
EXPAND	New info complements old memory (e.g. "has a sister" + "sister works in finance in Northvale")	Content merged into old note, evolution_history appended, new note absorbed
NEW	Unrelated content	Both notes kept as-is, pending_merge cleared

Why this matters

• evolution_history gives a full audit trail: you can answer "when did this memory change?"
• conflict flags surface contradictory facts for human review instead of silently picking one
• This is the key differentiator from mem0-style systems, which replace or append without tracking the relationship between old and new

References

• arXiv:2603.11768 (SSGM Framework, 2026) — memory evolution taxonomy: content abstraction / structural reorganization / policy optimization
• arXiv:2602.05665 (Graph-based Agent Memory, 2026) — conflict detection in graph update pipelines
• arXiv:2604.01707 (Memory in the LLM Era, 2026) — consolidation / updating / filtering / enhancement operations

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Quality Scoring & Auto-Review

Write-time quality gate

Every memory_add call passes through checkQuality() before any LLM or embedding work:

• Content under 10 characters → rejected with an error (e.g. "OK", "明白", "好的")
• Contains temporal signal words (待跑, 等确认, 昨日, 明天完成) → written with ephemeral: true flag

Periodic quality scan

The memory_quality_scan tool (or scanLowQuality() in code) scans the full memory store and returns entries in three categories:

Category	Condition
too_short	Content length under 10 characters
expired_ephemeral	ephemeral: true and written more than 7 days ago
pending_conflict	conflict: true — awaiting human review

Flagged entries are identified for human review via the memory_quality_scan tool.