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how agents that inherit consolidated memory can mistakenly rely on constraints that were once true but have since been superseded by newer records.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.

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
arXiv AI
Aug 12

From Faulty Memories to Corrected Actions: Dependency-Guided Rollback Repair for Memory-Augmented Agents

arXiv:2608. 10502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent memory lets language-model agents reuse information across sessions, but it also makes errors durable: a poisoned, stale, or misattributed record can alter reasoning, tool use, answers, and subsequent memory writes.

By Caili Yu, Yiqi Wang, Jiaqi Zhang, Yiqun Duan, Mingkai Zheng, Zhangkai Wu, Kaize Shi, Taotao Cai