Abstract
Persistent agent memory is only as reliable as its retention decision: an assertion weakly supported by its source can be stored and later reused as established fact. We study whether the retention decision should be governed by a confidence bar conditioned on the semantic category of the assertion rather than by a single global threshold, retaining well-evidenced categories liberally while abstaining more aggressively where inference is unreliable. We evaluate this in a deployed cold-start memory pipeline on 100 synthetic personas. The empirical evaluation is motivated by a sharp reliability asymmetry: across 4{,}715 candidate assertions, only 77.9\% of value and belief assertions are supported by their source, versus 96.2\% for all other categories. A global confidence threshold cannot separate these: it either admits unsupported value claims or discards well-evidenced ones. Conditioning the threshold on category resolves the tradeoff. In repeated held-out evaluation, a stricter bar on values alone reduces unsupported retentions from 6.2\% to 4.0\% (an ${\approx}36\%$ relative reduction, modest but consistent across folds) and, as corroborating evidence, preserves an estimated 13 percentage points more coverage (95\% CI 9.8--16.0) than a global threshold at comparable retention. Our results suggest that reliable retention depends on the type of assertion, not on confidence alone, and that a category-conditioned threshold can act as a simple, effective form of selective prediction at the write boundary.
Keywords
Publication details
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Cite this article
APA 7
Owolabi, O., Gupta, P., & Wang, F. (2026). When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-to-remember-when-to-abstain-category-conditioned-retention-for-reliable-agent-memory
MLA 9
Owolabi, Olukunle, et al. "When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-to-remember-when-to-abstain-category-conditioned-retention-for-reliable-agent-memory.
Chicago (author–date)
Owolabi, Olukunle, Pulkit Gupta, and Fei Wang. 2026. "When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-to-remember-when-to-abstain-category-conditioned-retention-for-reliable-agent-memory.
Harvard
Owolabi, O., Gupta, P. and Wang, F. (2026) 'When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-to-remember-when-to-abstain-category-conditioned-retention-for-reliable-agent-memory.
Vancouver
Owolabi O, Gupta P, Wang F. When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-to-remember-when-to-abstain-category-conditioned-retention-for-reliable-agent-memory
IEEE
O. Owolabi, P. Gupta, and F. Wang, "When to Remember, When to Abstain: Category-Conditioned Retention for Reliable Agent Memory," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-to-remember-when-to-abstain-category-conditioned-retention-for-reliable-agent-memory.