When Retrieval Fails Before It Begins: Structurally Indirect Prerequisite Eviction as a Retention Failure in Agentic Memory

Abstract

arXiv:2608.20400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic memory under a fixed budget involves two stages: retention and retrieval. Existing retrieval-centered paradigms implicitly assume necessary evidence survives eviction, but we challenge this by isolating a pre-retrieval failure mode: structurally indirect prerequisite eviction, in which upstream blocks weakly aligned with the query are discarded under budget pressure. We provide an operational definition of this failure, a reproducible deter