When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25553v3
• Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:13:37 GMT
• Title: When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory
• Abstract summary: Provenance links keep the evidence behind an inherited belief reachable; an agent with a verification budget must still choose which links to inspect.<n>We study a consolidated memory that states a decision constraint and whose source record has since been superseded by a record that withdraws it.<n>16 language models rarely re-verified a constraint that read as settled.<n>Once the constraint had been superseded, produced stale-consistent decisions in 77.3%, 74.7% and 74.7% of episodes across a primary run, a replication and a held-out domain.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Provenance links keep the evidence behind an inherited belief reachable; an agent with a verification budget must still choose which links to inspect. We study a consolidated memory that states a decision constraint and whose source record has since been superseded by a record that withdraws it: provenance is immutable, the current record has changed, and the memory is stale. In a controlled six-memory scenario with a budget of two records, sixteen language models rarely re-verified a constraint that read as settled: they inspected its provenance path in about one episode in five and, once the constraint had been superseded, produced stale-consistent decisions in 77.3%, 74.7% and 74.7% of episodes across a primary run, a replication and a held-out domain. Re-assigning one of the same two slots to the critical path removed most of them: +74.0, +72.7 and +61.3 points (positive in every model), +80.7 in a prospectively frozen interleaved replication with a repaired non-critical control, and +62.0 on a panel of 10 models from 9 organisations; a corrected re-run of the held-out scenario gave +73.3. The forced-critical policy uses experimenter knowledge of the critical path: it quantifies how much stale-decision risk the same budget can recover and is not a scheduler. Two further deposited experiments locate the failure and a remedy: in this store the constraint's path is selected in 17.0% of episodes at two slots and 88.7% at four of six (above uniform allocation), and at two slots a one-sentence, target-blind rule (prefer memories that state a limit on a candidate direction) moved the agent's own allocation onto the constraint's path and recovered the oracle contrast on decisions (+89.3 points) where that constraint limits the tempting action, while a content-free freshness cue did not materially redirect allocation and a content-matched control rule changed neither selection nor decisions.

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