What does 'k' mean in ConversationBufferWindowMemory

[Abe410]

Hi

I am using the ConversationBufferWindowMemory as my memory agent for a chatbot.

My question is, what does k denote?

Does it mean the last k messages? Or does it mean the last k AI messages? Or the last k human messages?

[dosubot[bot]]

🤖

Hi,

The 'k' in ConversationBufferWindowMemory of the LangChain framework represents the number of last interactions to keep in memory. It is used to limit the number of previous interactions that the model remembers and uses for generating responses.

An interaction here includes both the user's message and the AI's response. So if 'k' is set to 5, the model will remember the last 5 interactions, which includes 5 user messages and 5 AI responses. This is evident from the methods buffer_as_str and buffer_as_messages where the last 'k * 2' messages are retrieved from the chat memory.

You can find more details in the LangChain documentation and the source code for the buffer_window.py.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Sources

• docs/snippets/modules/memory/types/buffer_window.mdx
• libs/langchain/langchain/memory/buffer_window.py

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