The Memory Trust Gap: Capability-Dependent Failures in Persistent-Memory Agents

📅 2026-09-01
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决持久内存代理中因模型能力变化导致的陈旧事实覆盖当前权威证据的问题,通过不同规模模型在特定基准上的表现评估其影响及缓解方法。
📝 Abstract
Persistent memory supports personalized agents, but a stale stored fact can override current authoritative evidence without warning. We study when this harm begins as model capability changes. We evaluate a frozen, closed-set, action-scored benchmark with 2 suites that represent 2 different meanings of "no memory" (a Benefit suite, unsolvable without the stored fact, and a Safety suite, in which an authoritative tool always holds the correct value), on a same-family model-size series (Qwen3 0.6/1.7/4/8B). The Memory Trust Gap reflects over-trust rather than confusion. In the Benefit suite, models answer with the stale value 0.92-1.00 of the time at every scale. In the Safety suite, harm below the no-memory baseline under the trap conditions ($Δ_{\mathrm{mem}}$) is capability-gated, with the larger models collapsing most once a stale note is made to look current. In a $2\times2\times2\times2$ factorial, which feature triggers over-trust depends on both the feature and model scale. Removing a label amplifies over-trust at every size, and a recency feature (stale dated newer) fools the larger models harder. Source authority is weak and scale-flat, and position changes from positive to negative across the Qwen3 model-size series. We confirm these scale interactions with direct cross-size contrast tests rather than overlapping per-model intervals. Mitigation is likewise capability-dependent: exposing metadata improves accuracy for the capable models, but only pre-resolving the conflict restores accuracy for the 2 smaller checkpoints. The same pattern appears on the capable models in an independent Llama-Instruct model-size series and on 2 external datasets (RGB, MisBench). A framing control finds no consistent advantage for the memory label: at the 3 smaller scales, models trust a stale document more than a stale memory; at 8B, the difference is not significant.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Persistent Memory
Memory Trust Gap
Model Capability
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Persistent Memory
Model Capability
Over-Trust
Metadata Exposure
Conflict Resolution
J
Jundong Hu
PayPal AI
S
Shekar Ramachandran
PayPal AI