Beyond the Shadows of Plato's Cave: Evaluating False Memory in Autonomous Agents via Counterfactual Reasoning

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.39473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents increasingly rely on memory to generalize beyond their training environments. However, agents are bounded by what they have seen and believed, and leveraging such memories in unseen environments can introduce biases into their internal beliefs. We formalize this phenomenon as \textit{false memory}, which can arise from spurious correlations, environment shifts, and knowledge conflicts. Despite its importance, false memory is dif