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arXiv Computation and Language

When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory

The paper investigates how agents that inherit consolidated memory can mistakenly rely on constraints that were once true but have since been superseded by newer records. By modeling supersession explicitly and limiting verification to two records, the study shows that native allocation often leads to stale-consistent decisions, while reallocating one verification slot to the critical provenance path markedly improves consistency. The results suggest that memory systems may need separate freshness or supersession signals beyond relevance to avoid such errors.

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arXiv Computation and Language
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MoM: Memory of Memory

arXiv:2609.25054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a long-horizon LLM agent, the memory question is not what was once recorded but what \emph{currently holds}. Most designs answer it only indirectly...

By Bowen Qin, Yao Lu
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arXiv AI
Sep 3

The Memory Trust Gap: Capability-Dependent Failures in Persistent-Memory Agents

The paper investigates how persistent memory in AI agents can lead to over‑trust in stale facts, creating a "Memory Trust Gap" that worsens as model capability increases. Using a benchmark with Benefit and Safety suites across Qwen3 models of varying sizes, the authors show that larger models are more prone to harmful over‑trust, especially when metadata is absent or misleading. They also demonstrate that mitigation strategies such as exposing metadata or pre‑resolving conflicts improve accuracy, but the effectiveness depends on model size and dataset.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
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arXiv AI
Sep 2

Invalidation Contracts for Cross-Episode Agent Memory

The paper proposes invalidation contracts to manage cached recovery suggestions in LLM agents, attaching version stamps and cacheability hints to each suggestion so stale entries can be evicted without trial and error. The protocol separates realized savings into validity (protocol‑dependent) and compliance (planner‑dependent), showing that row‑level invalidation can significantly improve first‑try compliance and recover a substantial portion of token costs across multiple models, while table‑level invalidation can be detrimental. The study evaluates the approach across seven models, three serving paths, two domains, and about 9,400 episodes, demonstrating deterministic validity and high eviction precision.

By Michael Wu, Arquimedes Canedo
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arXiv AI
Aug 24

Temporal Validity on Real Software Histories: Eliminating Stale-Fact Errors in Code-Assistant Memory over GitHub Fixes

The paper evaluates a deterministic supersession memory, MemStrata, for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems on real software history. Using 707 GitHub issues, the authors extracted 130 clean atomic state transitions where a single value changes from pre‑fix to post‑fix. MemStrata achieved 0.91 answer accuracy versus 0.57–0.59 for standard RAG, eliminating stale‑fact errors that RAG returned 36–38% of the time, while maintaining comparable retrieval latency.

By Neeraj Yadav
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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Can an AI Assistant Really Forget? Auditable Deletion from Addressable Memory

This paper introduces a deletion interface for a pretrained language model, measuring how effectively deleted records are removed from the model’s memory. By retrofitting a support‑vector memory gate into the global attention layers of a frozen Gemma 3, the authors show that deletions can be performed without altering weights and that the resulting state is close to a reference state that never stored the record. Experiments on 4B‑parameter models demonstrate low perplexity impact and strong evidence that deleted content is hard to recover, while larger or smaller models fail to achieve the same guarantees.

By Vishwajith Ramesh
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