{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__cognitive_science","trajectory_id":"R","attempt_index":0,"archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"cognitive_science","decision":"CANDIDATE","problem_id":"stale_episodic_trace_interference_in_long_running_cognitive_agents","causal_lever_id":"governed_lifecycle_state_for_episodic_traces","proposal":{"problem":"Long-running cognitive agents can accumulate episodic traces whose original context, reliability, or action relevance has expired while the traces remain retrievable as ordinary evidence. The resulting proactive interference and source/context confusion can bias current decisions, yet indiscriminate forgetting can destroy rare-event knowledge, explanation paths, and autobiographical continuity. This is a problem of governing accumulated memory traces, not merely increasing storage or summarizing memory.","actors_substrate":["long-running artificial cognitive agents with episodic-memory stores","cognitive-science researchers and system operators","users affected by memory-guided outputs","people represented in stored episodes"],"observable_state":"The episodic store grows faster than traces are revalidated or retired; obsolete-context traces remain normally retrievable, stale traces appear among evidence for current decisions, retrieval cost or interference rises with accumulation, and operators cannot identify which traces can be safely demoted or removed.","consequence":"The agent may reuse outdated associations, confuse past and present contexts, or spend retrieval capacity on low-value traces; aggressive cleanup may instead erase provenance, recovery paths, or rare but consequential experience.","affected_objective":"Maintain context-appropriate recall and decision accuracy under bounded retrieval resources while preserving necessary provenance, reconstructability, and protected memories.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"sequential deposits with changing usefulness","domain_realization":"Each encoded episode is a temporally ordered deposit whose relevance and reliability may change when the environment, task, or agent policy changes.","claim_kind":"INFERENCE"},{"archetype_element":"stale layers mistaken for current truth","domain_realization":"An old episode can remain retrievable without an explicit current-context or supersession status and thereby influence present inference as if its conditions still held.","claim_kind":"HYPOTHESIS"},{"archetype_element":"bounded active stack with differentiated retention","domain_realization":"Traces move among active retrieval, reduced-access archive, protected hold, quarantine, and deletion states rather than facing a keep-versus-destroy choice.","claim_kind":"HYPOTHESIS"},{"archetype_element":"dependency-safe and auditable removal","domain_realization":"Removal is gated on whether explanations, learned abstractions, commitments, or reconstruction procedures still cite the trace; disposition and successor identity remain recorded.","claim_kind":"HYPOTHESIS"},{"archetype_element":"periodic revalidation of exceptions and policy","domain_realization":"Retention classes, protected traces, decay parameters, and restoration success are reviewed as tasks and environments change.","claim_kind":"HYPOTHESIS"}],"component_map":[{"component":"layer_inventory_and_identity_map","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Identity-resolved registry of episodic traces and duplicates."},{"component":"deposition_order_and_age_index","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Encoding time and sequence index for each trace."},{"component":"retention_policy_matrix","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Trace class mapped to minimum retention, review point, and allowed disposition."},{"component":"decay_function_or_aging_rule","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Age modifies a trace's review priority but cannot alone authorize deletion."},{"component":"expiration_trigger_definition","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Elapsed time, context change, contradiction, or prolonged nonuse triggers review or demotion."},{"component":"layer_value_and_risk_score","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Ranking from retrieval use, provenance, uniqueness, sensitivity, contradiction, and reconstruction value."},{"component":"dependency_and_reconstruction_check","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Check whether decisions, explanations, abstractions, or recovery paths depend on the trace."},{"component":"pruning_or_archival_pathway","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Refresh, suppress from ordinary retrieval, archive, compact, quarantine, or delete."},{"component":"preservation_exception_register","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Named protected traces for safety, consent, rare-event learning, evaluation, or continuity."},{"component":"deletion_audit_and_rollback_window","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Logged soft deletion with a time-bounded restoration period."},{"component":"resource_budget_and_storage_tier","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Budgets for active retrieval index, slower episodic archive, and protected store."},{"component":"review_cadence_and_revalidation_loop","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Scheduled review of flags, holds, thresholds, and restoration tests."},{"component":"legal_hold_or_compliance_override","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Consent, investigation, research-governance, or recordkeeping hold blocks disposition."},{"component":"hot_warm_cold_access_state","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Normal retrieval, reduced-priority retrieval, and archive-only trace states."},{"component":"orphan_layer_detection","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Detect traces with no live explanatory, inferential, policy, or reconstruction dependency."},{"component":"supersession_marker","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Mark an obsolete episode or interpretation with its replacement context or successor trace."},{"component":"layer_compaction_candidate_flag","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Flag redundant episode clusters for provenance-preserving abstraction while retaining exceptions."},{"component":"rehydration_or_restore_procedure","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Return an archived trace to readable, indexed, context-linked form."},{"component":"deletion_impact_estimate","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Estimate effects on recall, explanations, learned behavior, represented people, and recovery."},{"component":"stale_context_detector","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Flag mismatch between a trace's encoding context and the agent's current task or world model."}],"mechanism_dispositions":[{"slug":"age_weighted_value_score","disposition":"selected_supporting","contribution_type":"OPERATIONAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Rank traces for review using age plus uniqueness, provenance, context fit, sensitivity, and reconstruction value; prohibit score-only deletion.","counterfactual_removal":"Review becomes less scalable, but lifecycle states and safety gates still function."},{"slug":"archive_restore_test","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"SAFETY_GUARDRAIL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Periodically restore sampled traces across age and format bands and verify content, provenance, and index reconnection.","counterfactual_removal":"Archive could silently become irreversible loss, invalidating archive as the safe alternative to active retention."},{"slug":"cache_eviction_rule","disposition":"considered_rejected","contribution_type":"NONE","adaptation_or_rejection":"Access recency alone is an unsafe proxy for cognitive value; fast-index pressure may trigger demotion review but cannot select permanent victims.","counterfactual_removal":"No material change; tier budgets are enforced by governed demotion."},{"slug":"dependency_safe_delete_check","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"SAFETY_GUARDRAIL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Trace inbound dependencies from explanations, abstractions, commitments, evaluations, and reconstruction paths before deletion.","counterfactual_removal":"Deletion could alter learned behavior or destroy accountability despite a low value score."},{"slug":"lifecycle_storage_tiering_policy","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"CORE_CAUSAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Move cooling traces from ordinary retrieval to reduced-priority and archive states, with restoration available.","counterfactual_removal":"The intervention collapses toward keep-active or delete, losing its principal way to reduce interference without erasing memory."},{"slug":"log_rotation_and_cleanup_job","disposition":"considered_rejected","contribution_type":"NONE","adaptation_or_rejection":"Generation-blind rotation would discard salient rare episodes merely because newer episodes arrived.","counterfactual_removal":"No material change because trace disposition remains class-, context-, and dependency-sensitive."},{"slug":"retention_schedule","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"CORE_CAUSAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Define trace classes, review periods, allowable states, protected exceptions, and governance holds.","counterfactual_removal":"Disposition becomes ad hoc, and protected or sensitive traces lack consistent authority rules."},{"slug":"soft_delete_quarantine_window","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"SAFETY_GUARDRAIL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Suppress a trace first, log the action, observe consequences, and permit restoration before destruction.","counterfactual_removal":"First tests would expose the agent and represented people to irreversible memory loss."},{"slug":"stale_layer_detection_dashboard","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"TEST_DESIGN","adaptation_or_rejection":"Expose trace identity, context mismatch, contradictions, owner, dependencies, and lifecycle state without acting automatically.","counterfactual_removal":"Stale-context candidates and test exposure cannot be selected or audited reliably."},{"slug":"time_to_live_ttl_policy","disposition":"selected_supporting","contribution_type":"OPERATIONAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Use renewable TTLs only for explicitly temporary traces; expiry triggers review or demotion, never blind destruction.","counterfactual_removal":"Temporary traces require scheduled sweeps, but the core intervention remains viable."},{"slug":"tombstone_or_deletion_marker","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"SAFETY_GUARDRAIL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Keep a minimal marker containing identity, disposition reason, time, and successor so absence is not confused with nonexistence.","counterfactual_removal":"References and audits could not distinguish deletion from missing data or resolve supersession."}],"causal_chain":["Inventory traces and label encoding context, age, retrieval use, provenance, sensitivity, dependencies, and lifecycle state.","Detect context mismatch or expiry and rank candidates for review without authorizing deletion.","Apply retention holds and dependency checks, then choose refresh, supersession, reduced retrieval priority, archive, quarantine, or deletion.","Reduced ordinary retrieval exposure should lower competition from obsolete-context traces while preserving protected and reconstructive memory.","Restore tests, rollback observations, and periodic revalidation reveal harmful dispositions and recalibrate rules."],"baseline":"Ordinary baseline: retain all episodic traces in one normally searchable store until capacity pressure prompts manual deletion, while retrieval relevance mechanisms alone decide what becomes active.","nearest_rival":"Context-sensitive retrieval gating that leaves every trace in the active store but improves cue matching or inhibition; unlike lifecycle governance, it changes access at query time without explicit retention, archival, dependency, or deletion states.","authority_safety":{"affected_parties":["users receiving memory-guided outputs","people represented in stored traces","system operators and researchers","auditors or investigators relying on provenance"],"decision_authority":"A designated research data steward and system owner approve retention classes and irreversible deletion; represented-person rights and applicable governance holds override automation.","authorized_first_step":"In a sandboxed cognitive-agent benchmark, shadow-label traces and then randomly assign eligible stale candidates to ordinary retrieval or reversible reduced-priority retrieval for a fixed evaluation window; perform no hard deletion.","excluded_actions":["altering or attempting to delete biological human memories","hard deletion during the first test","removing traces under consent, investigation, safety, or governance hold","automatic deletion based only on age, score, or nonuse","deployment to consequential production decisions before sandbox evidence and review"],"halt_rollback":"Immediately restore suppressed traces and halt the test if predefined decision accuracy, rare-event recall, explanation completeness, subgroup impact, or restore-fidelity bounds are breached; preserve audit records for review."}},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Cognitive relevance may be reconstructed dynamically rather than stored as a stable property, and apparently obsolete episodes can become useful under novel contexts. If retrieval interference is already controlled by cue-dependent access, explicit lifecycle states may add complexity without benefit.","analogy_break":"Memory traces are not passive files: later learning and identity may be distributed across overlapping representations, so a trace can lack visible inbound references yet still influence behavior. Consequently, file-like orphan detection cannot prove cognitive independence.","failure_condition":"The proposal is unsafe or ineffective if trace identity and dependencies cannot be bounded well enough for reversible isolation, or if archived traces cannot be restored with preserved provenance and behavioral usefulness.","problem_falsifier":"Across matched long-running agents, accumulated obsolete-context trace exposure does not predict retrieval latency, source/context errors, or decision degradation after controlling for total memory volume and retrieval policy.","intervention_falsifier":"Against the ordinary baseline and context-sensitive retrieval gating rival, governed demotion produces no prespecified improvement in current-context accuracy or retrieval cost, or causes unacceptable loss of rare-event recall, explanation completeness, fairness, or restore fidelity.","risks":["False staleness labels can suppress minority, rare, or delayed-value experience.","Composite scores can disguise value judgments as precision.","Dependency scans can miss distributed behavioral influence.","Archives can become unreadable or too slow during urgent recall.","Quarantine conflicts with promises requiring immediate erasure.","Tombstones and metadata can themselves retain sensitive information.","Lifecycle rules may reshape an agent's continuity or explanations in ways not captured by benchmark accuracy."]},"null_rationale":null,"classification":{"candidate_kind":"MECHANISM_COMPOSITION","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","evidence_maturity":"HYPOTHESIS"},"revision_change_log":{"revision_kind":"ORIGINAL","prior_problem_id":null,"prior_causal_lever_id":null,"problem_changed":false,"causal_lever_changed":false,"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"repairs_addressed":[]},"confidence":0.78,"generator_notes":"Closed-book structural transfer. The candidate is scoped to inspectable artificial episodic-memory systems because irreversible intervention in biological memory would violate the required authority and rollback conditions."}