Utility Under Attack: Agent Memory Poisoning and the Limits of Content Screening and Provenance Ranking
This paper studies how a small amount of false information stored in persistent agent memory can sharply reduce downstream task accuracy. It evaluates content screening and provenance-weighted retrieval, identifies limits in both defenses under the measured LongMemEval setup, and motivates bounded occupancy constraints for retrieval. The paper reports the release of the evaluation harnesses, corpora, and aggregate run reports referenced in the study.
- memory poisoning
- agent memory
- adversarial evaluation
- provenance
- retrieval robustness
Plain-text citation
Karunanidhi, Arulnidhi. “Utility Under Attack: Agent Memory Poisoning and the Limits of Content Screening and Provenance Ranking.” arXiv preprint, arXiv:2608.21230, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21230