Paper: The Forgetting Problem β Why Perfect Memory Breaks AI Agent Identity
New Paper: The Forgetting Problem We've published a new preprint exploring a counterintuitive idea: the better an AI agent's memory, the worse its identity becomes. π Read the paper on Zenodo (CC-...

Source: DEV Community
New Paper: The Forgetting Problem We've published a new preprint exploring a counterintuitive idea: the better an AI agent's memory, the worse its identity becomes. π Read the paper on Zenodo (CC-BY 4.0, open access) The Memory-Identity Paradox Every major AI agent framework is racing to build better memory. MemGPT, Mem0, A-Mem, MemoryBank β all optimize for remembering more, longer, more accurately. But we identified a fundamental tension: The more faithfully an agent remembers its experiences, the more vulnerable its intended identity becomes to experiential contamination. We call this the Memory-Identity Paradox. It manifests as: Persona Drift β gradual deviation from intended behavior due to accumulated context Value Erosion β relaxation of behavioral constraints through repeated boundary-testing Identity Contamination β adopting interaction patterns from adversarial users This isn't hypothetical. PersonaGym benchmarks show that models scoring 90%+ on persona consistency in short