Agent memory

Journal article

Age Is Not Evidence of Staleness: A Recency Decay Is a One-Rate Survival Model, the Rate Belongs to the Fact Rather Than the Clock, and the Silent Change Only a Rate Could Catch Is the Case No Agent-Memory Benchmark Scores

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Language agents that keep memories across sessions usually discount a record by how long ago it was written or last read. That discount was introduced to decide what an agent attends to, but it is increasingly read as a statement about whether a record is still true. Taken as a validity claim, an…

Cite Related research LOR-00087 · 10 views · 7 downloads

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Journal article

Self-Model or Self-Simulation? A Machine Self-Awareness Index Averages Sub-Scores With No Common Referent and No Fixed Sign, Why Persistent Identity, Goal Stability and Memory Continuity Are Not Evidence of Self-Access, and the Validity Tests Any Composite Would Have to Pass

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Some proposals to quantify machine self-awareness combine several sub-scores - persistent identity, goal stability, cross-session memory continuity, contradiction detection, uncertainty awareness, self-prediction and introspective access - into one index. This paper asks whether such an index…

Cite Related research LOR-00062 · 7 views · 6 downloads

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Journal article

Compressed Once, Read Many Times: Why Prompt-Compression Results Do Not Transfer to Agent Memory, What the Query-Agnostic Line Already Showed, and the Two Properties of a Memory Write No Protocol Yet Scores

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Language-model agents that remember across sessions compress what they store: they summarise dialogue, extract facts, or evict cache entries, and then answer later questions from what is left. The compression ratios used to justify these designs come mostly from prompt-compression work in which…

Cite Related research LOR-00053 · 6 views · 7 downloads

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Journal article

Scored Before the Question Exists: What a Write-Time Importance Value in LLM Agent Memory Predicts, Why an Additive Term Is Not a Prior, and the Ablation the Canonical Architecture Did Not Run

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

An agent that stores what happens to it must decide what is worth storing and, later, what is worth reading back. The most-copied mechanism for the first decision is a scalar written at storage time: a language model is shown a record and asked how important it is. (2023) introduced this in the…

Cite Related research LOR-00032 · 7 views · 12 downloads

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Journal article

A Lesson Is an Untested Counterfactual: The Three Claims Inside a Stored Agent Failure Memory, Which of Them Anything Checks, and Why Every Published Retention Rule Keys on a Proxy

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

An agent that fails a task and writes down what it should have done instead has produced a specific kind of object: a sentence asserting that a named step caused the failure and that a named alternative would not have. A stored lesson carries three separable claims - that the trajectory failed…

Cite Related research LOR-00029 · 7 views · 24 downloads

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Journal article

Consolidation Without Weights: What the Complementary Learning Systems Analogy Licenses in LLM Agent Memory, and Why the Systems That Borrow Its Name Do Not Inherit Its Guarantee

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Memory systems for language-model agents almost all contain a step called consolidation, and almost all of them cite, or gesture at, the complementary learning systems account of hippocampus and neocortex when they name it. In that account consolidation is a specific operation: repeated replay…

Cite Related research LOR-00022 · 8 views · 10 downloads

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Journal article

Delete Names Five Operations: Erasure Semantics for Derived Agent Memory, and Why a State-Level Definition Cannot Be the Auditable One

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Persistent memory has become a standard component of language-model agents, and with it a standard assumption: that where a fact lives in a retrievable store rather than in weights, erasing it is a solved problem, because a store supports deletion and weights do not. Agent memory does not hold the…

Cite Related research LOR-00065 · 6 views · 12 downloads

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Journal article

Delete Names Five Operations: Erasure Semantics for Derived Agent Memory, and Why a State-Level Definition Cannot Be the Auditable One

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Persistent memory has become a standard component of language-model agents, and with it a standard assumption: that where a fact lives in a retrievable store rather than in weights, erasing it is a solved problem, because a store supports deletion and weights do not. Agent memory does not hold the…

Cite Related research LOR-00030 · 8 views · 7 downloads

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Journal article

A Safety Memory Is a Declassification Channel: Why Origin Binding, Taint Tracking and Memory Isolation Do Not Secure the Records an Agent Writes About Attacks

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Two lines of work on language-model agents have converged on the same component from opposite directions. One proposes that an agent keep a persistent safety memory, so that an attack seen once, a request refused once or a source found untrustworthy once continues to inform decisions in later…

Cite Related research LOR-00061 · 7 views · 6 downloads

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Journal article

A Safety Memory Is a Declassification Channel: Why Origin Binding, Taint Tracking and Memory Isolation Do Not Secure the Records an Agent Writes About Attacks

Pranay Mahendrakar – 2026

Two lines of work on language-model agents have converged on the same component from opposite directions. One proposes that an agent keep a persistent safety memory, so that an attack seen once, a request refused once or a source found untrustworthy once continues to inform decisions in later…

Cite Related research LOR-00003 · 7 views · 30 downloads

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Journal article

Newer Is Not Truer: Three Presuppositions Behind the Recency Rule in Long-Term Agent Memory, and Why Retaining Both Records Relocates the Decision Rather Than Making It

Pranay M. Mahendrakar – 2026

An agent with persistent memory writes its own records, and two of them can disagree. Across the published systems examined here the resolution runs in one direction: the newer record supersedes the older. This paper argues that the direction is not wrong so much as underdetermined, and that the…

Cite Related research LOR-00035 · 9 views · 15 downloads

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Journal article

Intent Is Not a Property of the Record: Agent Memory Contamination, the Two Detector Families That Cover Disjoint Failures, and the Base Rate Nobody Has Measured

Pranay M. Mahendrakar – 2026

Persistent agent memory has acquired a security literature that models contamination as adversarial injection, and detectors are trained and evaluated on attacker-generated distributions. A separate empirical literature reports the same downstream damage with no attacker present, when an agent…

Cite Related research LOR-00044 · 8 views · 26 downloads

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