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HFEPX · Eval paper review

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

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Published

Aug 26, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

20% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Aug 26, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Weak or implicit
Validate from full paper
Usefulness for eval research
0/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record. Under a scarce verification budget, does the agent recover the withdrawal, and if not, is the error avoidable without spending more? We model supersession explicitly -- historical provenance is immutable; what changes is which record is current -- and assign by design the memory's form, the world's state (source current or superseded), and the verification policy at a fixed budget of two records: the agent's own allocation, or the same budget with one slot re-assigned to the critical provenance path or to a random record. With a constraint stated, agents inspected its provenance path in about one episode in five; when that constraint had been superseded, native allocation produced stale-consistent decisions in 77.3%, 74.7% and 74.7% of episodes across a primary run, a fresh-wording replication and a held-out domain. Re-assigning one slot to the critical path raised current-record-consistent decisions by +74.0, +72.7 and +61.3 points, positive in six of six models in each of those runs, and changed nothing when the record agreed with the memory. The held-out scenario was later found to contain a temporal inconsistency; a robustness replication with one sentence corrected, deposited externally before execution, gave +73.3 points and is reported alongside the original. The intervention uses knowledge of the critical path and is not a scheduler; it identifies that the share of stale-memory error attributable to verification allocation is close to its structural ceiling. Memory systems may need freshness or supersession signals separate from relevance.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record."

Reported Metrics

partial

Relevance

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Memory systems may need freshness or supersession signals separate from relevance."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

relevance
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Unit of annotation
Trajectory (inferred)
Expertise required
General
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
None
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record.
  • Under a scarce verification budget, does the agent recover the withdrawal, and if not, is the error avoidable without spending more?
  • We model supersession explicitly -- historical provenance is immutable; what changes is which record is current -- and assign by design the memory's form, the world's state (source current or superseded), and the verification policy at a fixed budget of two records: the agent's own allocation, or the same budget with one slot re-assigned to the critical provenance path or to a random record.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record.
  • Under a scarce verification budget, does the agent recover the withdrawal, and if not, is the error avoidable without spending more?
  • With a constraint stated, agents inspected its provenance path in about one episode in five; when that constraint had been superseded, native allocation produced stale-consistent decisions in 77.3%, 74.7% and 74.7% of episodes across a…

Why it matters for eval

  • An agent that inherits a consolidated memory may inherit a constraint that was true when written and has since been withdrawn by a newer authoritative record.
  • With a constraint stated, agents inspected its provenance path in about one episode in five; when that constraint had been superseded, native allocation produced stale-consistent decisions in 77.3%, 74.7% and 74.7% of episodes across a…

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: relevance