Probing Stability-Plasticity Tradeoffs in Agent Memory through Cognitive Experimental Paradigms
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.30558 (cs)
[Submitted on 24 Sep 2026]
Title:Probing Stability-Plasticity Tradeoffs in Agent Memory through Cognitive Experimental Paradigms
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Abstract:Agent memory systems are increasingly used to maintain long-term user preferences, task states and evolving facts, but current evaluations often collapse memory behavior into final-answer accuracy. We introduce MemProbe, a cognitive-science-inspired framework for diagnosing stability-plasticity tradeoffs in agent memory. The framework is motivated by a core insight from cognitive memory research: memory is reconstructive and shaped by interference, source reliability, reinforcement, and reactivation. MemProbe turns this insight into four reusable experimental paradigms (interference, misinformation, consolidation strength, and reconsolidation window) that manipulate when a memory should be updated, preserved, or treated as uncertain. It further decomposes correctness into behavioral profiles that reveal how systems update, preserve, attribute, and temporally organize information. We instantiate these paradigms in a 56-episode diagnostic suite and evaluate six incremental memory systems under a unified protocol. Results show that systems with similar aggregate scores exhibit distinct behavioral profiles. MemProbe provides such a diagnostic lens, turning aggregate performance into interpretable profiles of memory maintenance over time. Code is available at this https URL.
| Comments: | Accepted by EMNLP 2026 Main, code is availble at this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.30558 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.30558v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30558
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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