ASTER: Closing the Control Gap via the Agent-state Transactional Execution Runtime

Agent systems accumulate increasingly rich structure across model calls—memories, plans, resources, observations, and execution histories—only to flatten it into context when the next decision arrives. Once flattened, that structure can tell the model what is connected, but it cannot make those connections operational: every new event again relies on model inference to determine which consequences follow, how far they propagate, and what prior state should survive. We call this gap between represented structure and executable state change the control gap. Starting from this observation, ASTER (Agent-State Transactional Execution Runtime) takes a different path: rather than treating structured relations only as context for model inference, it makes them executable at runtime. ASTER represents committed state as a versioned typed hypergraph whose relation contracts derive the scope of change and successor conditions for each event. The model proposes a transition, while ASTER certifies its realized effects before atomic commit. Across nine external benchmarks spanning single-agent, multi-agent and visually grounded embodied tasks, interactive service and web environments, and code generation, outperforms popular baselines in all settings. ASTER can also plug into an existing agent harness as its planning-state runtime, showing that its transition semantics are not tied to a particular actor loop.