arXiv AI

Governed Persistent Memory: Source-Bound State Semantics and Fail-Closed Release for Long-Horizon Agents

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agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim.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 AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

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how agents that inherit consolidated memory can mistakenly rely on constraints that were once true but have since been superseded by newer records.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

By Kazuki Nakayashiki