What Eviction Destroys: A Restore-Counterfactual Audit of Forgetting in Agent Memory
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2608. 07429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience.
The paper introduces MERIT, a benchmark that evaluates the marginal benefit of long‑term memory for tool‑using large language model agents while explicitly accounting for cost. MERIT provides episodic tool‑use tasks across three domains, verifies dependence on earlier‑episode facts, and measures memory operations in tokens and dollars. Experiments on GPT‑4.1‑mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 5 show that memory can significantly improve task success, but its utility varies widely across models and memory implementations, and full replay is rarely cost‑effective.
This paper introduces a deletion interface for a pretrained language model, measuring how effectively deleted records are removed from the model’s memory. By retrofitting a support‑vector memory gate into the global attention layers of a frozen Gemma 3, the authors show that deletions can be performed without altering weights and that the resulting state is close to a reference state that never stored the record. Experiments on 4B‑parameter models demonstrate low perplexity impact and strong evidence that deleted content is hard to recover, while larger or smaller models fail to achieve the same guarantees.
arXiv:2606. 26511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives agents access to accumulated knowledge, but has no model of time.
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.
arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.