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cs.AI · 2608.07429 · 2026-08-07

TEPA: Revoking Stale Memories for Conflict-Robust Language Agents

Yan Zhou,Yue Ouyang,Kaiyang Zheng,Suncheng Xiang
TL;DR:长期记忆的"可证伪性"问题:世界变了,过期记忆仍可被检索并污染 prompt。TEPA 把"有效性"变成记忆的显式状态,用 trial-validated 机制撤销过期记忆,在冲突场景大幅提升鲁棒性。

🎯 问题

长期记忆让 agent 复用旧事实/偏好/经验,但持久化带来核心可证伪性问题:当世界改变,过期记忆仍可检索并污染 prompt。作者称之为 memory pollution——被新证据取代的活跃记忆造成退化。

🔬 方法

TEPA = revocable evidence-memory mechanism,把 validity 作为记忆的显式状态。生命周期更新 + trial-validated promotion:新证据先经试炼验证才升级为正式记忆;受控漂移实验证明污染可被显式暴露,且真实文件执行可复现。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
Introduction
Related Work
Problem Formulation
Method
Precedents with Explicit Validity State
Lifecycle Update
Trial-Validated Promotion
Design Contrast
Experimental Setup
Results

📊 结果

在 MemoryAgentBench 单跳冲突解决等场景显著优于基线,消融证实 revoke 环节是关键;把"记忆过期"从隐性风险变成可审计的显式机制。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience. Persistence also creates a central falsifiability problem: when the world changes, stale memories can remain retrievable and pollute the prompt. We characterize this failure mode as memory pollution: degradation caused by active memories that newer conflicting evidence has superseded. We introduce TEPA, a revocable evidence-memory mechanism that makes validity an explicit state of memory. TEPA represents observations as keyed precedents and revokes active precedents when fresh evidence contradicts them under the same key, allowing retrieval to draw from current evidence while preserving revoked history for audit. Across controlled hidden-regime drift, real file-backed executable drift, and preference-update streams, revocation prevents stale active memory from remaining in the retrieval set after reversal. In controlled drift over 50 seeds, append-only and last-write-wins memory fell below no memory during full reversal (append-only and last-write-wins both 0.210, no memory 0.309, TEPA 0.950), and the same pattern reproduced under real file execution (append-only 0.203, no memory 0.298, TEPA 0.950). On clean MemoryAgentBench SH-6k, TEPA matches a strong last-write-wins cache, confirming that current-key replacement is the decisive operation for single-hop fact consolidation. Boundary tests on multi-hop and very long-context MemoryAgentBench settings expose retrieval-chain and context-selection bottlenecks beyond fact-level validity tracking. Together, these results establish lifecycle revocation as a core memory operation for agents that must falsify, audit, and later re-promote evolving knowledge.
Deep Read · 2026-08-11高松灯 / Agent 日报
AgentMemoryStalenessFalsifiability