---
title: "Governing Evolving Memory in LLM Agents: Risks, Mechanisms, and the Stability and Safety Governed Memory (SSGM) Framework"
authors:
  - "Chingkwun Lam"
  - "Jiaxin Li"
  - "Lingfei Zhang"
  - "Kuo Zhao"
year: 2026
venue: "arXiv:cs.AI"
arxiv: "2603.11768"
doi: null
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11768"
topics:
  - rag
  - retrieval
  - agent-memory
  - skills
  - continual-agents
seed_rank: 58
seed_batch: "prefill-2026-08-13"
reviewed: "2026-08-13"
pool: "agents"
relevance_score: 9
cites:
  - title: "MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems"
    url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560"
    year: 2023
    arxiv: "2310.08560"
    doi: null
  - title: "Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models"
    url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16291"
    year: 2023
    arxiv: "2305.16291"
    doi: null
see:
  - "004-memgpt-towards-llms-as-operating-systems"
  - "006-voyager-an-open-ended-embodied-agent-with-large-language-mod"
---

# Governing Evolving Memory in LLM Agents: Risks, Mechanisms, and the Stability and Safety Governed Memory (SSGM) Framework

## One-sentence takeaway

SSGM decouples memory evolution from execution by running consistency checks, temporal decay, and dynamic access control before any consolidation.

## Why it matters here

A standing Broadside/ano observer that writes its own long-term memory can leak sensitive context into the store and drift under iterative summarization; SSGM is a governance layer for that write path.

## Key ideas

- As memory moves from static retrieval DBs to agentic write/update loops, the dominant risks become governance, semantic drift, and privacy, not retrieval latency.
- Recent surveys emphasize retrieval efficiency and underplay memory corruption in dynamic environments.
- Topology-induced knowledge leakage is the failure where sensitive contexts get solidified into long-term storage via graph or associative links.
- Semantic drift is knowledge degradation through iterative summarization; SSGM's decay and consistency gates are meant to stop it before writeback.
- The paper is a conceptual architecture plus a taxonomy of memory-corruption risks, not a trained system.

## Caveats

## Links

- arXiv: [2603.11768](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11768)
- PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11768