arXiv AI
Sep 30

Memory Is a Derivation: The Distributed-Evidence Paradox in Long-Term Agents

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
arXiv AI
Oct 16

MemCut: Every Secret Leaves a Trail in the Long-Term Memory of LLM Agents

MemCut introduces a benchmark to test user-requested forgetting in large language model agents, featuring 456 hand-designed secrets embedded in long-horizon conversations with fully annotated evidence trails. The benchmark defines two recovery metrics—native and residual—to assess how well secrets can be retrieved after deletion. Experiments across five memory designs and four LLMs show that deletion reduces native recovery more than residual recovery, highlighting candidate coverage as a key bottleneck.

By Cheng Zhang, Xuanning Cao, Zhicheng Zheng, Hui Xiong