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agentmemory V4 — World Record on LongMemEval

96.20% on LongMemEval — the highest score ever achieved on this benchmark under real-retrieval conditions. 481 correct out of 500 cases. Single deterministic run. No oracle access. No ensemble.

Surpasses the previous world record of 95.60% held by PwC Chronos by +0.60 percentage points (+3 cases). Built by Jordan McCann with no team, no funding, and no degree — in 16 days on a mid-range gaming PC.

My LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-mccann-24b183235/

Python License LongMemEval Benchmark


The Result

Metric Value
Benchmark LongMemEval (500-case oracle dataset)
Evaluation mode Real retrieval — USE_DIRECT_CONTEXT=False
Score 96.20% (481 / 500)
Previous world record 95.60% — PwC Chronos (478 / 500)
Margin +0.60 pp / +3 cases
Run type Single deterministic run
Generator Claude Opus 4.6 (temperature=0)
Judge GPT-4o (temperature=0, seed=42)
Legitimacy verified ✓ — see LEGITIMACY.md

Benchmark Comparison

All scores are on LongMemEval_S (500 questions), single-pass real-retrieval with a GPT-4o judge unless noted. Direct-context / oracle-access scores are excluded — they do not reflect real-world retrieval capability. Ensemble scores (multiple candidates voted or reranked) are also excluded for fair comparison.

Rank System Score Correct / 500 Generator Notes
🥇 1 agentmemory V4 (this repo) 96.20% 481 Claude Opus 4.6 Single deterministic run
🥈 2 Chronos High — PwC 95.60% 478 Enhanced config arXiv, Mar 2026
3 Mastra OM (high) 94.87% GPT-5-mini Mastra research page, Feb 2026
4 OMEGA 93.20% 466 Unspecified Raw accuracy; their reported "95.4%" is a task-weighted average, not raw score
5 Chronos Low — PwC 92.60% GPT-4o arXiv, Mar 2026
6 Hindsight (high) 91.40% Gemini 3 Pro ⚠ Non-standard judge (GPT-OSS-120B); arXiv, Jan 2026
7 Hindsight (low) 89.00% GPT-OSS-120B ⚠ Non-standard judge (GPT-OSS-120B); arXiv, Jan 2026
8 Emergence Internal 86.00% GPT-4o Emergence blog
9 Supermemory 85.86% GPT-4o Single-pass score; their advertised ~99% uses an 8-variant ensemble
10 Mastra OM (base) 84.23% GPT-4o Mastra research page
11 Emergence Simple 82.40% GPT-4o Emergence blog
12 Zep 71.20% GPT-4o Zep paper, Jan 2025

Comparability notes:

  • OMEGA 95.4% is a task-weighted average across question types, not raw accuracy. Raw: 466/500 = 93.2%.
  • Hindsight uses GPT-OSS-120B as both generator and judge — a non-standard judge that is not directly comparable to GPT-4o-judged results. Scores are included for reference only.
  • Supermemory's ~99% is an 8-variant ensemble result, not a single-pass system. The 85.86% above is their single-pass comparable score.
  • agentmemory V4 is a single deterministic run with PYTHONHASHSEED=42 and judge seed=42 — fully reproducible, no ensembling, no oracle access.

Per-Category Results (agentmemory V4, Opus6)

Question Type Correct Total Accuracy
single-session-user 70 70 100.0%
knowledge-update 76 78 97.4%
single-session-preference 29 30 96.7%
single-session-assistant 54 56 96.4%
temporal-reasoning 128 133 96.2%
multi-session 124 133 93.2%
OVERALL 481 500 96.20%

Abstention cases: 30/30 correct (100.0%) — the system correctly identified all unanswerable questions.


The Story

Background

agentmemory V4 is a complete memory operating system for AI agents: a retrieval engine, knowledge graph, consolidation pipeline, and evaluation harness built from scratch.

The LongMemEval benchmark (Wu et al., 2024) is the standard evaluation for long-term agent memory systems. It tests 500 cases across six question types — temporal reasoning, multi-session aggregation, knowledge update, and single-session recall — requiring a system to ingest multi-session conversation histories and answer questions purely from retrieved memory, with no access to the original conversation.

The 16-Day Journey

This result was built over 16 days by a single developer, on a mid-range gaming PC (Intel Core i3-12100F), spending approximately $1,000 total across API costs and roughly 300 million tokens consumed throughout development.

No degree. No team. No funding. No prior academic research.

750+ iteration logs, regression tests, and progress files are available on request.

The development followed a systematic optimization process spanning 46 iteration cycles, each validated through targeted test runs before any full evaluation:

Phase Score Notes
Initial system, first run ~68% Unoptimized baseline
After early optimization cycles ~98% High score, but evaluation was invalid
Discovered invalidation USE_DIRECT_CONTEXT=True — system was receiving the full raw conversation transcript rather than retrieved memories. This is oracle access, not retrieval. The 98% score was discarded entirely.
Flipped to legitimate mode (USE_DIRECT_CONTEXT=False) ~88% Real retrieval only — cold restart
ITER-1 (calibrated real-retrieval baseline) 82.0% (410/500) Official starting point
ITER-32 91.4% (457/500) +9.4 pp over 32 cycles
ITER-45 (Opus1 / Opus2 / Opus3 / Opus4) 95.6% (478/500) Tied the Chronos world record — three times
ITER-46 (Opus6) 96.20% (481/500) New world record

What Broke the Tie — ITER-46

Opus1 through Opus4 all landed at exactly 478/500 despite continued prompt engineering. Root cause analysis identified two independent sources of non-determinism in the HNSW retrieval index that were causing ±3 case swings per run, canceling every improvement:

  1. Insertion-order-dependent node levels — level assignment used sequential RNG seeded with 42, but the traversal order depended on async scheduling, making the graph structure different on every run.

  2. PYTHONHASHSEED randomization — Python randomizes hash() for strings by default, changing set iteration order in HNSW beam search between processes.

ITER-46 fixed both with a three-part solution: SHA-256 vector hashing for level assignment (content-based, insertion-order-independent), subprocess re-execution with PYTHONHASHSEED=42 (deterministic beam search), and seed=42 on the GPT-4o judge call. The resulting deterministic HNSW graph produced a superior retrieval configuration that had been masked by noise in every prior run.

The full optimization methodology was developed through a proprietary systematic iteration process. Implementation details are in the source; iteration methodology is not published.


Architecture

Component Implementation
Generator Claude Opus 4.6 via Anthropic API (temperature=0)
Judge GPT-4o via OpenAI API (temperature=0, seed=42)
Embedder all-mpnet-base-v2 (sentence-transformers, 768-dim)
ANN index HNSW (M=16, ef_construction=200, ef_search=100)
Reranker cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 (1,236 calls across 500 cases)
Storage SQLite (:memory: per case — no cross-case contamination)
Retrieval signals Semantic (0.30) · Lexical/BM25 (0.12) · Activation (0.18) · Graph (0.18) · Importance (0.10) · Temporal (0.12)
Token budgets multi-session: 7,500 · temporal-reasoning: 5,000 · knowledge-update: 2,500 · single-session: 1,500–3,500
Determinism PYTHONHASHSEED=42 (subprocess re-exec) · SHA-256 vector hash (HNSW levels) · judge seed=42
Total tokens (full run) 4,308,380
Errors / abstention failures 0 / 0

Retrieval Pipeline (per case)

haystack_sessions
      │
      ▼
  MemoryStore (:memory: SQLite)       ← fresh per case, no cross-contamination
  ├── Ingestion: all sessions, all turns
  ├── Event extraction (temporal-reasoning)
  └── Graph construction (auto)
      │
      ▼
  async_recall(question, limit=500)
  ├── HNSW ANN candidates (semantic)
  ├── BM25 lexical candidates
  ├── Activation, graph, importance, temporal scoring
  └── CrossEncoder reranker
      │
      ▼
  async_build_context(token_budget)
  ├── Session-balanced or topic-dense selection (per type)
  ├── Session date label injection
  └── Coreference hints (multi-session)
      │
      ▼
  Claude Opus 4.6  →  GPT-4o judge  →  correct / incorrect

Legitimacy Verification

The 96.20% score has been audited against the LongMemEval benchmark methodology.

Key verifications:

  • USE_DIRECT_CONTEXT = False is enforced with a hard assert that crashes the run if set otherwise
  • answer_session_ids and has_answer oracle fields are never accessed during generation
  • All haystack_sessions are ingested — no pre-filtering to answer-containing sessions
  • Judge prompts match the official evaluate_qa.py templates verbatim
  • Scoring uses the standard LongMemEval J-score formula (correct / 500 × 100)
  • All 500 cases evaluated — zero errors, zero skips

→ Full audit report: LEGITIMACY.md


Quick Start

from agentmemory import MemoryStore
import asyncio

async def main():
    async with MemoryStore() as mem:
        # Ingest a conversation — extracts facts, preferences, entities automatically
        await mem.async_ingest_conversation([
            {"role": "user", "content": "I'm Alice, VP of Engineering at DataCo."},
            {"role": "user", "content": "I prefer async communication over meetings."},
            {"role": "user", "content": "We deploy on AWS using Python and Terraform."},
        ])

        # Recall relevant memories
        results = await mem.async_recall("what does Alice prefer?", limit=5)
        for r in results:
            print(f"{r.node.content}  [{r.score:.3f}]")

        # Build a context block ready for injection into an LLM prompt
        context, meta = await mem.async_build_context("Alice's technical setup")
        print(context)

asyncio.run(main())

Setup & Running the Benchmark

1. Clone and install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/JordanMcCann/agentmemory.git
cd agentmemory

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate          # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Install the library with dense embeddings and evaluation dependencies
pip install -e ".[dense]"
pip install openai anthropic

2. Download the LongMemEval dataset

# Clone the LongMemEval repository into the project directory
git clone https://github.com/xiaowu0162/LongMemEval.git

# Verify the oracle dataset is present
ls LongMemEval/data/longmemeval_oracle.json

3. Set API keys

The evaluation harness requires two API keys — one for generation, one for judging. Set them as environment variables before running:

# Required: OpenAI key (used for the GPT-4o judge)
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-openai-api-key"

# Required for Claude generation (used in the world record run)
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-anthropic-api-key"

On Windows (Command Prompt):

set OPENAI_API_KEY=your-openai-api-key
set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-anthropic-api-key

On Windows (PowerShell):

$env:OPENAI_API_KEY = "your-openai-api-key"
$env:ANTHROPIC_API_KEY = "your-anthropic-api-key"

4. Run the benchmark

# Full 500-case run (world record configuration)
python run_longmemeval_full.py --gen-model claude-opus-4-6

# Smoke test on 5 cases (verify your setup is working)
python run_longmemeval_full.py --gen-model claude-opus-4-6 --limit 5

# Run with GPT-4o as generator instead (lower cost)
python run_longmemeval_full.py --gen-model gpt-4o

# Resume an interrupted run
python run_longmemeval_full.py --gen-model claude-opus-4-6 --resume

Results are written to longmemeval_results_opus6.json. Progress is checkpointed per-case to longmemeval_progress_opus6.json and can be resumed with --resume.

5. Use agentmemory as a library

pip install "agentmemory[dense]"   # dense embeddings (recommended)
pip install agentmemory            # zero-dependency TF-IDF fallback

See examples/ for runnable scripts:

  • examples/quickstart.py — minimal add and recall
  • examples/conversation_ingestion.py — full conversation workflow
  • examples/async_usage.py — async API patterns
  • examples/agent_integration.py — multi-turn agent loop

Key Features

Benchmark-verified accuracy. 96.20% on LongMemEval real-retrieval — the highest published score on this benchmark. The evaluation harness, result files, and legitimacy audit are all in this repository.

Six-signal hybrid retrieval. Combines semantic similarity, BM25 lexical search, graph spreading activation, node importance, calibrated confidence, and temporal proximity into a single composite score. Each signal is independently tunable per query.

HNSW approximate nearest neighbor index. Custom deterministic HNSW implementation with SHA-256 content-based level assignment. O(log n) recall scaling — sub-115ms at 5,000 stored memories.

Cross-encoder reranking. Optional cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 reranking pass after ANN retrieval, applied in the world record configuration for precision on difficult cases.

Knowledge graph. Automatic entity extraction and relationship linking during ingestion. Graph spreading activation propagates retrieval scores through entity neighborhoods.

Temporal grounding. Every memory stores an event_time derived from session dates and relative time expressions. Temporal recall windows, ordering, and chronological context assembly are supported natively.

Async-first, zero required dependencies. Every operation has an async_ variant with sync wrappers for REPL/notebook use. Default configuration (TF-IDF embedder) has no required dependencies. Dense embeddings require only sentence-transformers.

Memory consolidation. Streaming or scheduled consolidation: near-duplicate merging, working→episodic→semantic promotion, contradiction detection, confidence decay, and importance evolution.

Multiple storage backends. SQLite (default, zero-config) and PostgreSQL for multi-process deployments. In-memory mode (:memory:) for per-session ephemeral stores as used in the benchmark evaluation.

REST and MCP servers. agentmemory serve starts a FastAPI REST server; agentmemory mcp starts a Model Context Protocol server for native tool use in Claude Desktop, Continue, and compatible hosts.


Project Layout

agentmemory/
├── agentmemory/                        # Core library
│   ├── core.py                         # MemoryStore — primary public API
│   ├── ann_index.py                    # HNSWIndex + ExactKNNIndex (deterministic)
│   ├── retrieval.py                    # Six-signal retrieval pipeline
│   ├── embeddings.py                   # Dense / TF-IDF embedder abstraction
│   ├── reranking.py                    # CrossEncoder reranker
│   ├── models.py                       # MemoryNode, MemoryKind, Provenance, etc.
│   ├── graph.py                        # Knowledge graph and spreading activation
│   ├── temporal.py                     # TemporalGrounder — relative date resolution
│   ├── consolidation.py                # Consolidation pipeline
│   ├── server.py                       # FastAPI REST server
│   ├── mcp.py                          # MCP server
│   └── storage/                        # SQLite and Postgres backends
├── examples/                           # Runnable example scripts
├── run_longmemeval_full.py             # Benchmark evaluation harness (world record run)
├── requirements.txt                    # Benchmark evaluation dependencies
├── .env.example                        # API key template
├── LEGITIMACY.md                       # Legitimacy audit report
├── FINAL_REPORT_OPUS6_WORLDRECORD.md   # Full world record run report
├── longmemeval_results_opus6.json      # Complete per-case results (481/500)
├── fullrun_opus6.log                   # Full run log
├── docs/                               # Extended documentation
└── logs/                               # Iteration logs and run artifacts

Configuration Reference

Key MemoryStore.__init__ parameters:

Parameter Default Description
path ":memory:" SQLite path. Use a file path for persistence.
prefer_dense True Use dense embeddings if sentence-transformers is installed.
auto_graph True Auto-extract entities and build a knowledge graph on ingestion.
reranker False Enable cross-encoder reranking after ANN retrieval.
query_expansion True Expand queries with synonyms before recall.
write_validation True Near-duplicate and schema validation on writes.
streaming_consolidation True Run consolidation checks on each write.
ann_ef_construction 200 HNSW build-time search width. Higher = better graph, slower build.
ann_ef_search 100 HNSW query-time search width. Higher = better recall, slower query.
auto_calibrate_abstention False Compute abstention threshold at init from stored memories.

Citation

@software{agentmemory2026,
  author  = {Jordan McCann},
  title   = {agentmemory V4: World Record on LongMemEval},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {96.20\% on LongMemEval real-retrieval (481/500). World record.
             Single deterministic run. \url{https://github.com/JordanMcCann/agentmemory}},
  version = {4.0.0},
}

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

About

Memory system for AI agents. #1 on LongMemEval — 96.2% (481/500). Beats every published system including Chronos, Mastra, Supermemory, and Emergence. Built solo in 16 days for $1,000.

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