When Retrieval Is Not Enough: Obsolete Facts in Agent Memory

Authors: Oleeviya Babu Poikarayil , Tony Basil Babu , Abdulrahman Nahhas , Het Darshan Mehta , Jawid Ahmad Baktash , Ernesto William De Luca , Klaus Turowski

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Abstract: Memory-agent benchmarks often collapse retrieval and answer generation into one score, making it hard to tell whether a failure comes from missing an update or from not using an update that was already retrieved. We examine this distinction on the single-hop FactConsolidation task of MemoryAgentBench. With Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on 6K-history BM25 accuracy drops from 45% to 32% when the retrieved evidence budget grows from 64 to 512 tokens, even though a gold-assisted post-hoc audit finds the newest statement in every retrieved set. Most of the errors occur on questions that also contain an obsolete statement version. Under a frozen prompt and equal four-statement evidence size, replacing one unrelated statement with the obsolete competing statement reduces accuracy from 100% to 44.6% for Qwen2.5 and from 100% to 87.8% for Qwen3-14B, with all 50 harmful paired flips classified as stale. A 32K-history replication likewise favors BM25-64 over BM25-512 (69% versus 58%). These results suggest that retrieving the correct fact is not enough. An obsolete competing statement can be more harmful than an unrelated piece of evidence of the same size.

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Accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Personalized, Aligned, Long-Term Memory for AI Systems (PALM). 23 pages, including supplementary material

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Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

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arXiv:2610.36308 [cs.AI]

(or

arXiv:2610.36308v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.36308

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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From: Jawid Ahmad Baktash [ view email ]

[v1]

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:30:26 UTC (136 KB)

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