Automatic Categories (Category Discovery)

How the plugin creates new categories automatically from your data: the category discovery step groups “other” facts by free-form topic labels; any label that appears often enough becomes a real category.

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Overview

Besides custom categories in config, the plugin can discover new categories from facts in "other":

1. Discovery — Before reclassifying “other” into existing categories, an LLM assigns each “other” fact a short topic label (1–2 words). No fixed category list is given; the LLM invents labels from the text (e.g. “food”, “travel”, “technical”).
2. Threshold — Any label with at least minFactsForNewCategory facts (default 10) becomes a new category. The threshold is not shown to the LLM.
3. Reclassify — Those facts are updated from "other" to the new category.
4. Persist — New category names are written to .discovered-categories.json (next to your SQLite DB) and merged with config categories on load.

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When it runs

Discovery runs only as part of the auto-classify job (same schedule: ~5 min after startup, then every 24 h if autoClassify.enabled is true). It runs only if:

• autoClassify.suggestCategories is true (default), and
• There are at least 15 “other” facts (internal minimum).

Discovery runs before the normal “reclassify other into existing categories” step.

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How it works (steps)

1. Load all facts with category "other".
2. Send them to the LLM in batches of 25. Prompt: assign a short label per fact; output a JSON array of strings.
3. Normalize labels (trim, lowercase, length ≤ 40); discard empty or "other".
4. Group facts by label. For each label with count ≥ minFactsForNewCategory that is not already a category:
   • Add it as a new category.
   • Update those facts from "other" to the new category.
5. Read .discovered-categories.json, merge in new names, write back.

Built-in and config categories are unchanged; discovered ones are added and used everywhere (memory_store, classify, CLI).

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Config

Option	Default	Description
autoClassify.suggestCategories	true	Run category discovery before reclassifying “other”. Set false to only use existing categories.
autoClassify.minFactsForNewCategory	10	Min facts per label to create a new category. Not sent to the LLM.

Discovery uses autoClassify.model (e.g. gpt-4o-mini).

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File

• Path — ~/.openclaw/memory/.discovered-categories.json (or next to sqlitePath). JSON array of strings, e.g. ["research", "travel"].
• Backup — Include this file in backups if you care about preserving discovered category names (see BACKUP.md).

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Related docs

• FEATURES.md — Categories and classification pipeline
• CONFIGURATION.md — autoClassify and categories
• CLI-REFERENCE.md — hybrid-mem classify, categories
• DYNAMIC-DERIVED-DATA.md — Overview of tags, categories, decay, and other derived data