DREAM — Dynamic Retention Episodic Architecture for Memory

Modern AI systems lack persistent, user-specific episodic memory. Existing approaches rely on short-term context windows, shallow preference storage, or static conversation logs that do not scale and cannot preserve meaningful long-term continuity. This paper introduces DREAM (Dynamic Retention Episodic Architecture for Memory), a scalable, opt-in, episodic memory framework designed to work with current LLM and agent architectures. DREAM integrates episodic summarization, user-controlled opt-in memory, semantic retrieval via per-user vector indexes, an adaptive retention mechanism that expands TTL based on user engagement, and horizontal sharding of orchestrators and storage for large-scale deployments. The paper details the architecture, components, data flows, and implementation examples, and argues that DREAM provides a practical path toward AI systems capable of consistent, privacy-aligned long-term reasoning.

This project has been extended with a conceptual analysis and simulation of a "DREAM-as-a-Support" (DaaS) hybrid layer. This extension demonstrates DREAM's architectural extensibility, reframing it from a standalone framework into a foundational platform component. The DaaS model provides core memory governance such as adaptive retention (ARM) and user-centric opt-in as an on-demand service to complementary cognitive systems, validating the original four-pillar design through a scalable, internal API.

Reference Implementation

A reference implementation of the DREAM architecture is available as an open-source Python framework:
Official Reference Implementation

This implementation is intended for experimentation and architectural validation and does not represent a production-ready system

DREAM Architecture — Official GitHub Repository