Paper Detail

Episodic-to-Semantic Consolidation Without Identity Drift

Xue Qin, Simin Luan, Cong Yang, Zhijun Li

arxiv Score 13.3

Published 2026-07-02 · First seen 2026-07-03

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Long-running adaptive intelligent agents face a structural tension between knowledge consolidation and information integrity. Memory consolidation is conventionally treated as an agent-changing operation: a model is fine-tuned, a prompt rewritten, a policy distilled, or a reflection appended to the context that governs future behaviour. In regulated autonomic deployment this is a liability because the agent operates under commitments and audit contracts that bind to a specific, cryptographically certified identity. We propose to treat consolidation not as a mutation of the planner or the identity manifest, but as a deterministic function f: M^ep -> M^sem over episodic memory whose output is a separately addressable semantic knowledge layer; the identity hash does not read M^sem, so consolidation updates knowledge without changing the agent's certified identity. We give a formal account of the agent representation, prove identity invariance through a structural lemma on the manifest's hash-input set, specify a deterministic aggregation algorithm whose outputs are auditable database rows with explicit confidence and supporting-event provenance, and validate the construction with synthetic experiments demonstrating per-field correctness, byte-equal identity across consolidation passes, and a mean 79.82% reduction in unproductive planner attempts (95% BCa CI [78.02%, 81.49%] across 10 seeds) against a calibrated Bayesian-shrunk baseline. The construction is a knowledge-update discipline for autonomic agents in which lessons accumulate as queryable facts while the agent's certified identity remains byte-equal across its operational lifetime, with an embodied service agent as the running case study.

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BibTeX

@article{qin2026episodic,
  title = {Episodic-to-Semantic Consolidation Without Identity Drift},
  author = {Xue Qin and Simin Luan and Cong Yang and Zhijun Li},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Long-running adaptive intelligent agents face a structural tension between knowledge consolidation and information integrity. Memory consolidation is conventionally treated as an agent-changing operation: a model is fine-tuned, a prompt rewritten, a policy distilled, or a reflection appended to the context that governs future behaviour. In regulated autonomic deployment this is a liability because the agent operates under commitments and audit contracts that bind to a specific, cryptographically},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01988},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.RO},
  eprint = {2607.01988},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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