TEPA: Revoking Stale Memories for Conflict-Robust Language Agents
arXiv:2608. 07429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience.
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how agents that inherit consolidated memory can mistakenly rely on constraints that were once true but have since been superseded by newer records.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:2608. 07429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience.
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.
arXiv:2607. 16019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly retrieve from records that revise themselves: issue threads, encyclopedic histories, policy logs, and long conversations.
arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.
A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains.
arXiv:2608. 16630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repository-scale coding requires an agent to keep tests, imports, configuration, and migration rules consistent within a bounded context window.
arXiv:2608. 04278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents increasingly work across sessions, but prose notes can preserve a conclusion without the program state that supported it.
arXiv:2608. 12476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim.
arXiv:2606. 06240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistent memory for an LLM agent is a write-heavy substrate: every belief update is a versioned write, and a new claim may contradict a stored one.
arXiv:2606. 27472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents operate over long, multi-session interactions in which facts change: a user moves, a price updates, a plan is revised.
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.
arXiv:2606. 26511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives agents access to accumulated knowledge, but has no model of time.