arXiv AI By Juli Huang

What Should an Agent Remember? Disentangling Retention from Retrieval in Bounded-Memory Evaluation

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The paper introduces a streaming-recall benchmark that separates retention and selection decisions for persistent agents. It shows that query‑aware selection boosts recall by 15.5 points when access is fixed, while mixed comparisons inflate gains due to changes in history access. The study finds that under bounded retention, failures stem from eviction rather than ranking errors, and that dense retrieval can outperform lexical retrieval on natural text.

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