Scope Before You Persist: Preventing Cross-Family Interference in Agent Memory

arXiv:2609.29144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent memory lets language-model agents improve prompts and skills without updating model weights. We show that matching retrieval scope to certification scope enables these edits to support reliable repeated adaptation across recurring task families. We study frozen-model agents on ProcStream-RSI, a 12-round code-repair stream, using Orthogonal Regression Control (ORC), an execution-grounded gate for persistent skill edits. In an intervention that holds proposals and gate decisions fixed, retrieving each accepted skill only for its originating family raises mean hidden trajectory utility f