FlyHash for LLM Agent Memory: An Empirical Validation and a New Application

Authors: Mohan Bheemadolu , Chrisogonas O. Odhiambo

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Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory stores to retain information across conversations, typically via dense vector embeddings searched with approximate nearest-neighbor methods. The fruit fly's olfactory circuit computes a locality-sensitive hash of sensory input using a strikingly different mechanism - sparse random projection followed by winner-take-all competition - and prior work (Dasgupta et al., 2017) showed this scheme, dubbed FlyHash, preserves neighbor structure better per bit than conventional random-hyperplane hashing (SimHash) on several benchmarks. We apply FlyHash, to our knowledge for the first time, to LLM agent memory retrieval, and ask three questions a practitioner actually needs answered: does the quality advantage hold under a correctly matched-bit protocol (it does, robustly, across 10 seeds and four datasets spanning two modalities, with one specific, previously undocumented comparison pitfall identified and corrected along the way); does that advantage translate into real memory and latency savings, including against the dense-vector indexing (HNSW) practitioners default to today (no: at equal bits FlyHash's codes are larger and slower to compare than SimHash's, and HNSW dominates both hash methods at ordinary scale; a sparse-set comparison we introduce recovers most but not all of a naive latency gap, leaving hashing's practical case narrower and more specific than the quality result alone implies); and does the advantage survive genuine, non-circular agent-memory relevance labels rather than the nearest-neighbor-by-embedding proxy this literature otherwise relies on (it does). We report all three answers precisely, including the two that narrow rather than flatter the headline result, and release our implementation, a working agent-memory demo, and a full account of the methodological pitfalls we found and corrected.

Comments:

19 pages. Code, data and interactive demo: this https URL (archived at this https URL )

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ; Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as:

arXiv:2611.05791 [cs.AI]

(or

arXiv:2611.05791v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05791

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Chrisogonas Odhiambo [ view email ]

[v1]

Wed, 4 Nov 2026 00:57:24 UTC (46 KB)

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