langchain/docs/modules/memory/key_concepts.md
Harrison Chase 985496f4be
Docs refactor (#480)
Big docs refactor! Motivation is to make it easier for people to find
resources they are looking for. To accomplish this, there are now three
main sections:

- Getting Started: steps for getting started, walking through most core
functionality
- Modules: these are different modules of functionality that langchain
provides. Each part here has a "getting started", "how to", "key
concepts" and "reference" section (except in a few select cases where it
didnt easily fit).
- Use Cases: this is to separate use cases (like summarization, question
answering, evaluation, etc) from the modules, and provide a different
entry point to the code base.

There is also a full reference section, as well as extra resources
(glossary, gallery, etc)

Co-authored-by: Shreya Rajpal <ShreyaR@users.noreply.github.com>
2023-01-02 08:24:09 -08:00

1.1 KiB

Key Concepts

Memory

By default, Chains and Agents are stateless, meaning that they treat each incoming query independently. In some applications (chatbots being a GREAT example) it is highly important to remember previous interactions, both at a short term but also at a long term level. The concept of "Memory" exists to do exactly that.

Conversational Memory

One of the simpler forms of memory occurs in chatbots, where they remember previous conversations. There are a few different ways to accomplish this:

  • Buffer: This is just passing in the past N interactions in as context. N can be chosen based on a fixed number, the length of the interactions, or other!
  • Summary: This involves summarizing previous conversations and passing that summary in, instead of the raw dialouge itself. Compared to Buffer, this compresses information: meaning it is more lossy, but also less likely to run into context length limits.
  • Combination: A combination of the above two approaches, where you compute a summary but also pass in some previous interfactions directly!