Most AI applications are stateless. They forget users between sessions, lose context mid-conversation, and treat every interaction as if it never happened before.

MemVault is the memory layer that fixes this. Plug it into any AI agent or MCP-compatible client and give it persistent, semantically-searchable memory — backed by SQLite or PostgreSQL, ranked by recency, importance, and access frequency, and smart enough to consolidate duplicates automatically.

from memvault import MemVault

mc = MemVault()
mc.remember("User prefers Python over JavaScript", user_id="alice")

results = mc.recall("programming language preferences", user_id="alice")
# → [0.82] User prefers Python over JavaScript

Features

• Semantic retrieval — finds memories by meaning, not keyword matching
• Hybrid ranking — embedding similarity + recency + importance + access frequency
• Auto-ingestion — extract memorable facts from raw conversations automatically
• MCP server — plug into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client
• Multiple backends — SQLite (zero setup), PostgreSQL (production), in-memory (tests)
• Consolidation — detects near-duplicate memories and merges them
• Decay & reinforcement — unaccessed memories fade; accessed ones strengthen
• REST API + CLI — use as a standalone service or a Python library
• Provider-agnostic — bring your own embedder, extractor, or storage backend

Quick Start

Library

pip install "eviloomemvault[local]"

from memvault import MemVault, MemoryType

mc = MemVault()

# Store a memory
mc.remember(
    "User prefers dark mode and concise answers",
    user_id="alice",
    memory_type=MemoryType.SEMANTIC,
    importance=0.8,
)

# Retrieve by meaning — not keywords
results = mc.recall("display preferences", user_id="alice")
for r in results:
    print(f"[{r.final_score:.3f}] {r.item.content}")

# Auto-ingest from a conversation
mc.ingest(
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "I've been using Rust for systems work."},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Python is my go-to for AI projects."},
    ],
    user_id="alice",
)

MCP Server (Claude Desktop / Cursor)

Add to ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "memvault": {
      "command": "/path/to/venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["-m", "memvault.mcp_server.server"],
      "env": {
        "MEMVAULT_DB": "/path/to/memvault.db",
        "HF_HUB_OFFLINE": "1",
        "PYTHONPATH": "/path/to/memvault/src"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. It now has 6 memory tools and will remember things across conversations using your local database.

REST API

# Docker (recommended)
docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up

# Direct
uvicorn memvault.api.app:app --reload --port 8000

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/memories \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"agent_id": "a1", "user_id": "alice", "content": "Prefers Python", "type": "semantic"}'

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/memories/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text": "programming preferences", "user_id": "alice"}'

Interactive docs at http://localhost:8000/docs.

CLI

# Install with local embeddings
pip install "eviloomemvault[local]"

memvault remember "User prefers dark mode" --user alice
memvault recall "display preferences" --user alice
memvault consolidate --user alice
memvault doctor

Installation

# Core (REST API + CLI)
pip install eviloomemvault

# With local BGE embeddings (recommended)
pip install "eviloomemvault[local]"

# With PostgreSQL support
pip install "eviloomemvault[postgres]"

Requirements: Python 3.10+

Benchmarks

Measured on CPU-only hardware (no GPU), BGE-small embeddings, Python 3.10. Full results: docs/benchmark_results.md

Key result: retrieval latency barely changes from 100 to 5,000 memories — candidate fetch is O(limit) not O(n), so the store can grow without degrading response time.

To reproduce: python benchmarks/benchmark_suite.py

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    Your Application                     │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
                           │
              ┌────────────▼────────────┐
              │     MemVault Facade     │
              │  remember · recall      │
              │  ingest · consolidate   │
              └────────────┬────────────┘
                           │
        ┌──────────────────┼──────────────────┐
        │                  │                  │
┌───────▼───────┐  ┌───────▼───────┐  ┌──────▼────────┐
│  Intelligence │  │    Storage    │  │  Embeddings   │
│  retrieval    │  │  SQLite       │  │  BGE-small    │
│  scoring      │  │  PostgreSQL   │  │  (pluggable)  │
│  decay        │  │  In-Memory    │  └───────────────┘
│  ingestion    │  │  (pluggable)  │
└───────────────┘  └───────────────┘

Service interfaces: REST API · CLI · MCP Server · Python SDK

Memory Types

Storage Backends

All backends implement the same interface — swap with one line:

from memvault import MemVault
from memvault.storage.postgres import PostgresStorage

mc = MemVault(storage=PostgresStorage("postgresql://user:pass@host/db"))

Ingestion

Extract memorable facts from conversations without manually deciding what to remember:

# Rule-based (zero dependencies, works offline, <1ms)
mc.ingest(messages, user_id="alice")

# LLM-powered (higher quality, requires API key)
from memvault.ingestion.anthropic_extractor import AnthropicExtractor
mc.ingest(messages, user_id="alice", extractor=AnthropicExtractor())

Retrieval Scoring

final_score = (similarity_weight × cosine_similarity)
            + (relevance_weight  × relevance_score)

relevance_score = 0.4 × recency
                + 0.4 × importance
                + 0.2 × frequency

All weights are configurable via RetrievalConfig and ScoringWeights.

Project Structure

src/memvault/
├── core/               # Models, scoring, retrieval, consolidation
├── storage/            # SQLite, PostgreSQL, in-memory backends
├── embeddings/         # BGE-small and pluggable embedding providers
├── ingestion/          # Rule-based and LLM-powered fact extraction
├── api/                # FastAPI REST service
├── cli/                # Typer CLI
├── mcp_server/         # MCP server for Claude Desktop / Cursor
└── observability/      # Structured logging and metrics

benchmarks/             # Performance benchmark suite
docs/                   # Architecture, getting started, benchmarks

Roadmap

• Core memory engine (scoring, retrieval, consolidation, decay)
• SQLite and PostgreSQL backends
• BGE-small local embeddings
• REST API (FastAPI) + CLI (Typer)
• Docker support
• MCP server (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code)
• Auto-ingestion (rule-based + Anthropic extractor)
• Performance benchmarks
• Published on PyPI
• Async storage backends
• OpenAI / Cohere embedding providers
• Semantic ingestion extractor (BGE-based)
• pgvector support
• LangChain / LlamaIndex integration
• TypeScript SDK
• Web dashboard

See docs/roadmap.md for the full roadmap with details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug fixes, new backends, embedding providers, and performance work especially.

git clone https://github.com/Aryaneviloo/memvault.git
cd memvault
pip install -e ".[local,dev]"
pytest