Research Unpacks Agent Memory: The Memory Contract of Sparse Event-KV

Zefeng Cai · hf · 2026-08-04

This paper explores how long-horizon agents reuse their KV cache as memory, introducing the concept of the memory contract for sparse event-KV serving.

The authors test whether a retained event remains informative once the observations that produced it are dropped. They identify semantic materialization: a downstream event's cached rows act as an independently servable view of computation whose inputs are gone. A deliberately phrased, answer-free event can raise donor-aligned recovery from 6% to 51% on Qwen3-8B without ever naming the value. The findings reveal that compact state survives while larger payloads decay toward chance. Consequently, dropping a source event and observing no accuracy loss does not prove the source was unnecessary.

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