What Makes Agent Memory Useful for Reliable Unanswerable Question Handling?
Reliable handling of unanswerable questions (UAQs) is critical for trustworthy LLM-based agents. Although memory is widely used in agent systems, its role in reliable UAQ handling remains unclear. We present a systematic study of agent memory for UAQ handling under a unified agentic RAG framework, evaluating four representative memory methods across three UAQ-related datasets and two base models. We find that memory can improve UAQ performance in some settings, but such gains are selective rather than universal and remain fragile under dataset shift. Interestingly, cross-model memory reuse is often more feasible than cross-dataset transfer, suggesting that shifts in answerability patterns...
| Authors | Chuanyuan Tan, Junjie Yu, Yuxin Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 August 2026 |
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