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:2607. 16019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly retrieve from records that revise themselves: issue threads, encyclopedic histories, policy logs, and long conversations.
By Zhaoyang Jiang, Zhizhong Fu, Zicheng Li, Yunsoo Kim, Jiacong Mi, Xuanqi Peng, Fei Teng, Honghan Wu
arXiv:2608. 07429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience.
By Yan Zhou, Yue Ouyang, Kaiyang Zheng, Suncheng Xiang
The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.
By Guangzhe Zhang
arXiv:2609.08279v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agent memory systems must discard stored information when their history exceeds a fixed token budget. Existing budget-accuracy frontiers quantify the...
By Chen Shen
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
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.
By Hwai-Jung Hsu, Cheng-Jan Chi, Hanna Everett
The paper introduces "stale‑document poisoning," a temporal alignment failure where outdated retrieval evidence causes retrieval‑augmented generation models to produce incorrect answers even when the model could answer correctly without retrieval. A benchmark of 317 verified knowledge reversals across medicine, law, software, and platform policy shows that outdated evidence flips 30–37% of Llama and Qwen answers, rising to 66–75% when models are explicitly instructed to trust the document. The study demonstrates that providing explicit validity information and a recency‑aware re‑ranker can substantially reduce poisoning, highlighting the need for models to assess whether retrieved evidence remains applicable.
By Md Shamim Ahmed, Lukas Galke Poech, Richard R\"{o}ttger
arXiv:2609. 04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache.
By Chao Yao, Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Junhong Qian, Chenle Chen, Shaoqiang Lu, Chen Wu, Lei He
The paper introduces the Distributed‑Evidence Paradox, where long‑running LLM agents compress past interactions into persistent memories that may not be fully supported by the interaction history. It defines three key requirements—evidence scope, compositional validity, and admission reliability—and proposes DerivAudit, a framework that checks whether a memory is truly supported by the available history. Experiments on two memory corpora show that expanding the evidence base can recover support for many memories, yet many remain unsupported, and broader evidence alone does not guarantee reliable admission.
By Hongjun Liu, Chen Zhao
The paper introduces LSREP, a Longitudinal State‑Replay Evaluation Protocol designed to assess how conversational memory evolves over time, incorporating ordered replay, lifecycle schedules, repeated probes, evolving reference answers, and mechanism‑fidelity checks. It applies LSREP to ICE v2, a local‑first memory middleware, and reports that on three ordinary‑density datasets ICE v2 achieves near‑zero mean quality difference from vector‑RAG while using fewer fragments but slightly more prompt tokens, yet fails catastrophically on a dense dataset. In a public diagnostic, ICE v2 underperforms pure vector‑RAG on LongMemEval, revealing significant multi‑session and temporal failures and a quality‑cost trade‑off rather than superior efficiency.
By Deepesh Sonar
arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.
By Alex Kwon