arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.
By Alex Kwon
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.
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: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
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 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