When Memory Becomes Authority: Benchmarking Authority Collapse at the Memory Consolidation Boundary
Persistent memory allows (self-evolving) LLM agents to adapt across tasks by consolidating heterogeneous interaction histories into reusable facts, preferences, observations, and rules. Yet consolidation also imposes an implicit authorization boundary: it determines whether stored information may later be consumed as a user fact, an attested observation, or a standing instruction. We identify authority collapse, in which consolidation preserves a claim while erasing the source constraints governing its authorized use, causing the stored memory to imply greater authority than its source permits. We introduce AuthMem-Bench, a controlled paired benchmark that holds the focal claim and downst...
| Authors | Qiuyang Zhan, Rui Zhang, Sheng Guo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
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