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Memory Is Not Always Needed: Characterizing Conditional Memory in Scientific Reasoning

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 25, 2026 · UTC

Scientific reasoning requires language models to retrieve specialized knowledge and incorporate it reliably into multi-step computation. Conditional memory provides an explicit lookup pathway that complements dense neural representations, but its usefulness is inherently input- and computation-dependent: retrieved information may repair missing scientific associations, yet it may also introduce distracting shortcuts or interfere with reasoning that the base model can already perform correctly. In this work, we systematically investigate when, where, and to what extent conditional memory should

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