TRACE: Open-Source Hierarchical Memory for LLM Agents
PsychologicalDot7749 · reddit · 2026-07-06
TRACE is an open-source hierarchical memory system for LLM agents (pypi package trace-memory) that organizes conversation history into a topic tree (branches + summaries) rather than flat RAG chunks. The author evaluated it on the EventQA precise retrieval task of MemoryAgentBench (ICLR 2026).
F1 Results: TRACE achieved 82.5% with gpt-oss-20B and 83.8% with gpt-oss-120B. In contrast, Mem0 (GPT-4o-mini, official paper figures) scored 37.5%, and MemGPT/Letta (GPT-4o-mini) scored 26.2%.
It should be noted that the author ran the open-weight gpt-oss models locally, which isn't a fair backbone comparison against the GPT-4o-mini used by Mem0/MemGPT. The author attempted to run Mem0 directly on gpt-oss-20B for a fair comparison, but its fact extraction step requires strict JSON output, which gpt-oss failed to parse cleanly (a similar issue occurred with Gemini/Mistral). Letta was skipped as it requires a full server deployment. Complete JSON logs from two runs are open-sourced in the repository.
Related event: TRACE Open-Sources Hierarchical Memory for Agents(3 posts)→
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