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The Immutable Past: Formalizing State Mutability and Conflict Resolution in Mutable RAG

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 13, 2026 · UTC

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) serves as the primary memory architecture for long-horizon autonomous agents. However, treating shared memory as an append-only stream introduces \textit{Semantic Shadowing}, a critical failure mode where conflicting historical observations accumulate and statistically dominate valid recent updates. In dynamic environments, this results in severe state divergence as agents retrieve and act upon obsolete facts. This paper formalizes the mechanics of State Mutability to prove that standard dense retrieval suffers from Asymptotic Recall Decay. Furthermore, we

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