Think Before You Remember: Uncertainty-Gated Relational Memory for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory to guide future interactions, but what happens when that memory treats an uncertain judgment as an established fact? In relational memory, an ambiguous observation can prematurely change an agent's trust in another actor, turning a tentative interpretation into a persistent premise for decisions. Unlike an isolated reasoning error, this mistake can persist beyond the interaction that produced it. Storing more history or re-reading past interactions does not by itself prevent this failure; the memory must also decide which inferred changes are justified. We propose Confidence-Aware Relational Memory (CARE), an uncertainty-aware relational memory framework built on a simple principle: remember the evidence without prematurely settling its meaning. CARE separates supported relationship updates from unresolved interpretations. It comprises three modules: (1) Consensus Write applies effects shared across plausible interpretations while gating interpretation-specific updates on sufficient support; (2) Hypothesis Buffer retains unresolved interpretations and their potential effects alongside the original events; (3) Evidence Replay uses new evidence linked to pending events and integrates the supported stored effects once the ambiguity is resolved. Our experiments show that CARE reduces relational-state displacement at ambiguous events by 10.6–46.9% compared with immediate updating. Ablation studies confirm the complementary roles of Consensus Write, Hypothesis Buffer, and Evidence Replay. These findings highlight the importance of controlling what enters relational memory while preserving a path for later revision.