[Submitted on 22 Sep 2026 (
[v1](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25913v1)), last revised 6 Oct 2026 (this version, v2)]
[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.25913)
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Abstract:A language agent's execution history can exceed its context window, requiring its memory system to retrieve complete supporting evidence under a hard token budget. Evidence may span multiple execution events, yet conventional retrievers use fixed token windows and fixed-k metrics that reward individual fragments without showing whether the complete evidence set fits in context. Smaller windows reduce irrelevant text but scatter evidence across candidates, while flat-versus-graph comparisons can conflate candidate design with graph propagation. To address these limitations, we formulate agent-memory retrieval as budgeted evidence completion and score exact gold spans in shared source coordinates. We first construct source-aligned provenance units from tool arguments and outputs. We then apply a zero-initialized residual R-GCN to refine frozen dense-retrieval scores over typed provenance edges. We evaluate 2,000 span-grounded memory queries over 1,207 held-out execution-grounded ISETrace trajectories. With matched Dense-FT scoring, provenance units improve Full Support@2048 by 19.07 points over flat 512-token windows and remain 11.96 points above a per-metric oracle over four flat chunk sizes; the pattern also holds with cross-encoder scoring. Holding the candidates and seed scores fixed, graph propagation adds 4.55 points in Full Support@2048 (95% CI [2.98, 6.18]). This gain is concentrated when gold evidence spans multiple events; entity co-occurrence expansion produces no comparable benefit, and relation and topology controls confirm dependence on typed transformations and observed graph structure. Overall, source-aligned candidates address the dominant granularity trade-off, while graph-conditioned propagation adds a smaller, targeted benefit for distributed evidence.
Submission history #
From: Jiaqi Zhang [
[view email](https://arxiv.org/show-email/34d621e7/2609.25913)]
**Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:20:51 UTC (375 KB)**
[\[v1\]](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25913v1)
**[v2]** Tue, 6 Oct 2026 01:58:15 UTC (374 KB)
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