Cosine Similarity Said 0.92. The Payload Was Already Dead.
An agent retrieves something from memory. Its next action looks different. Someone writes a blog post: the agent was poisoned by persistent memory. Maybe. But there is a large gap between "the action changed" and "the memory changed the action," and almost every demo I have seen falls into it. This post is about closing that gap with instrumentation instead of adjectives. It comes with three…
An agent retrieves information from memory and alters its behavior. A blog post examines the issue of memory poisoning in AI agents and proposes a solution using instrumentation. The post introduces a counterfactual estimator to measure the impact of removing a specific carrier from retrieval. This estimator is validated on a deterministic scripted agent before being applied to larger models.
The script runs multiple scenarios with and without the carrier's presence to calculate the change in action steps. The results show that removing a non-existent carrier has no effect, while removing a redundant carrier does not change the agent's action. The post emphasizes the importance of measuring redundancy and validating the instrumentation before attaching a model.
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