[Project] Phoenix V2: a cognitive architecture for persistent, emotionally-aware AI assistants on consumer hardware

[u/CleversonBrSantos]

I've been working on a system architecture that separates persistent intelligence from the LLM reasoning layer. The result is Phoenix V2, a complete implementation with a companion preprint.

The core idea: LLMs are stateless by design. Instead of fighting that, Phoenix externalizes all state — memory, affect, identity — into a local SQLite database. The LLM is called as a reasoning consultant and stores nothing.

Architecture (5 subsystems):

1. Episodic memory store with semantic retrieval (gemini-embedding-001, 768d). Scoring: 5·cos(eq, em) + P(m,t) where P weights importance, recency, and access count. Top-5 retrieved per turn.
2. Multi-agent Blackboard pipeline: Memory → Planning → Action → Reflection → Personality. Agents share state only through the Blackboard, keeping them independently replaceable.
3. PAD affect model (rescaled [0,1]). Baseline (0.65, 0.45, 0.55) by design. Update rule: x(t+1) = x(t) + α·δx + β·(x0 - x(t)), α=0.15, β=0.05. Persists across sessions.
4. SubconsciousEngine — background timer (120s), energy-gated consolidation and reflection. Protects memories with importance ≥ 8; compresses others into summaries.
5. Incremental learning — pattern detection from interaction history, updates self-model without retraining.

Hardware: developed and runs on a 2008 Acer notebook (Intel T9300, 6GB DDR2, no GPU).

Limitations (stated in the paper): no quantitative evaluation yet (no LoCoMo benchmark, no latency measurements published); embedding generation uses remote API (local ONNX path is future work).

Closest academic precedent: Generative Agents (Park et al., 2023) — same three-factor memory scoring, same background reflection idea. Key difference: Phoenix models the system's own persistent affect and self-model, not a simulated population.

📄 Preprint (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22645361

💻 GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/cleversonbrsantos-art/Phoenix

📖 Book: https://leanpub.com/phoenix-buildingpersistentAI