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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 26, 2026 · UTC

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 We study a consolidated memory that states a decision constraint and whose source record has since been superseded by a record that withdraws it: provenance is immutable, the current record has changed, and the memory is stale.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

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