arXiv:2604.12007cs.AI2026-04被引 1

提出记忆价值度量,用成败共现频率判断记忆该保留还是丢弃。

When to Forget: A Memory Governance Primitive

论文配图:When to Forget: A Memory Governance Primitive
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 为每条记忆维护成功与失败共现次数,动态评估其价值
  • 实验显示其相关性达0.89,远超不更新的系统
  • 轻量设计适合集成到现有智能体架构中

智能体记忆系统积累经验,但缺乏对记忆质量进行合理治理的指标——即在任务分布变化时,如何判断哪些记忆应被信任、抑制或淘汰。现有方法依赖静态写入重要性评分,或使用大模型判断与结构启发式,而非基于实际结果反馈。本文提出记忆价值(Memory Worth, MW):每个记忆配备两个计数器,追踪其与成功和失败结果的共现频率,构建一个轻量且理论基础扎实的过时检测、检索抑制与淘汰决策机制。理论上证明,在稳定检索与最小探索条件下,MW几乎必然收敛于条件成功概率 p+(m) = Pr[y_t = +1 | m in M_t],即记忆被调用时任务成功的概率。值得注意的是,该值反映的是关联性而非因果性,但仍可作为有效的操作信号。我们在可控合成环境中验证:经过10,000轮实验后,记忆价值与真实效用的斯皮尔曼秩相关系数达到 ρ = 0.89 ± 0.02(20个独立种子),而始终不更新评估的系统相关系数为 ρ = 0.00。在真实文本与神经嵌入检索(all-MiniLM-L6-v2)的小型实验中,过时记忆的值降至0.17以下,而专用记忆仍保持在0.77以上,持续3,000轮。该估计算法仅需每个记忆单元两个标量计数器,可无缝集成至已记录检索与结局的系统中。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Agent memory systems accumulate experience but currently lack a principled operational metric for memory quality governance -- deciding which memories to trust, suppress, or deprecate as the agent's task distribution shifts. Write-time importance scores are static; dynamic management systems use LLM judgment or structural heuristics rather than outcome feedback. This paper proposes Memory Worth (MW): a two-counter per-memory signal that tracks how often a memory co-occurs with successful versus failed outcomes, providing a lightweight, theoretically grounded foundation for staleness detection, retrieval suppression, and deprecation decisions. We prove that MW converges almost surely to the conditional success probability p+(m) = Pr[y_t = +1 | m in M_t] -- the probability of task success given that memory m is retrieved -- under a stationary retrieval regime with a minimum exploration condition. Importantly, p+(m) is an associational quantity, not a causal one: it measures outcome co-occurrence rather than causal contribution. We argue this is still a useful operational signal for memory governance, and we validate it empirically in a controlled synthetic environment where ground-truth utility is known: after 10,000 episodes, the Spearman rank-correlation between Memory Worth and true utilities reaches rho = 0.89 +/- 0.02 across 20 independent seeds, compared to rho = 0.00 for systems that never update their assessments. A retrieval-realistic micro-experiment with real text and neural embedding retrieval (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) further shows stale memories crossing the low-value threshold (MW = 0.17) while specialist memories remain high-value (MW = 0.77) across 3,000 episodes. The estimator requires only two scalar counters per memory unit and can be added to architectures that already log retrievals and episode outcomes.

记忆管理智能体评估机制轻量设计

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