Authority Before Utility: Non-Compensatory Control for Persistent LLM Memory
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The paper introduces Causal Memory Policy (CMP), a framework that identifies the utility of memories in memory‑augmented language models by intervening on retrieval rather than on storage. CMP reserves fixed context slots for memories sampled with known propensities and estimates utility using self‑normalized inverse propensity weighting, providing unbiased estimates and exact variance. Experiments show that CMP improves discrimination between required and non‑required memories and reveals that identified utility alone is insufficient for retention decisions across unseen queries.
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.
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...
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.
arXiv:2606. 29178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When does retention matter for memory-augmented LLM agents?
LLM agents that persist across sessions accumulate stored memories whose validity varies enormously by content type, yet existing memory architectures treat all memories as equally persistent and systematically contaminate retrieved context with outdated facts. We show that per-memory, type-conditioned temporal decay, a property of western scrub jay episodic memory, can be operationalized as an auto-classified coefficient $π_i$ in an external LLM-agent memory store, yielding ScrubJay-MEM: each memory is encoded as a jointly-bound What--Where--When tuple with an estimated perishability $π_i$ and utility horizon $τ_i$, retrieved by query-adaptive scoring, and revised retroactively at $O(1)$ LLM calls per update.