# A Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation System with Selective Memory and Remembrance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02428/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 10 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14403/) (2024)
- [LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05779/) (2024)
- [MBA-RAG: a Bandit Approach for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Question Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01572/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Adaptive RAG Memory (ARM), a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that replaces a static vector index with a dynamic memory substrate governed by selective remembrance and decay. Frequently retrieved items are consolidated and protected from forgetting, while rarely used items gradually decay, inspired by cognitive consolidation and forgetting principles. On a lightweight retrieval benchmark, ARM reaches near state-of-the-art performance (e.g., NDCG@5 ≈ 0.940, Recall@5 =1.000) with only ~22M parameters in the embedding layer, achieving the best efficiency among ultra-efficient models (<25M parameters). In addition, we compare static vs. dynamic RAG combinations across Llama 3.1 and GPT-4o. Llama 3.1 with static RAG achieves the highest key-term coverage (67.2%) at moderate latency, while GPT-4o with a dynamic selective retrieval policy attains the fastest responses (8.2s on average) with competitive coverage (58.7%). We further present an engineering optimization of the DynamicRAG implementation, making embedding weights configurable, adjustable at runtime, and robust to invalid settings. ARM yields competitive accuracy, self-regularizing memory growth, and interpretable retention dynamics without retraining the generatorcolorblack and provides practical trade-off between quality, latency and memory efficiency for production and research RAG system.