Forgetting Without Restarting: Execution-State Unlearning for Stateful LLM Agents
Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache. Yet today's "forget" operations delete a plaintext memory record and stop, leaving every artifact derived from the revoked information intact. We formalize execution-state unlearning: after a forget request, the agent must behave as if it had never observed the target. Modeling the runtime as a deterministic transition system, we prove that the pre-target trajectory prefix is shared with this counterfactual world for free, that the post-target suffix is irreducibly tainted without token-level attribution, and that ex...
| Authors | Chao Yao, Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 4 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.