When Old Facts Return: Re-Reads, Reverts, and the Limits of Temporal Memory
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The paper evaluates a deterministic supersession memory, MemStrata, for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems on real software history. Using 707 GitHub issues, the authors extracted 130 clean atomic state transitions where a single value changes from pre‑fix to post‑fix. MemStrata achieved 0.91 answer accuracy versus 0.57–0.59 for standard RAG, eliminating stale‑fact errors that RAG returned 36–38% of the time, while maintaining comparable retrieval latency.
arXiv:2607. 16019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly retrieve from records that revise themselves: issue threads, encyclopedic histories, policy logs, and long conversations.
arXiv:2608. 07429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience.
The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.
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:2608. 10502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent memory lets language-model agents reuse information across sessions, but it also makes errors durable: a poisoned, stale, or misattributed record can alter reasoning, tool use, answers, and subsequent memory writes.