Epistemic Memory: A Validity Layer for Self-Maintaining Intelligent Systems

Abstract

AI memory mechanisms primarily focus on preserving information content, often neglecting the validity conditions under which knowledge remains applicable, leading to semantic coordinate drift when agents move, change sensors, or encounter novel environments. This paper proposes epistemic memory as a validity-maintenance layer that governs when stored knowledge remains applicable. We formalize the dynamic epistemic quotient, an observation-induced equivalence structure over hypotheses that evolves with an agent's interaction history and sensing capabilities. We derive a pairwise incompatibility lower bound showing that any fixed semantic representation must incur unavoidable error across changing epistemic boundaries. We further identify a failure mode under symmetric crossing quotients, where overlap-based class-level transport becomes independent of pre-transition belief, motivating preservation of within-class hypothesis provenance. We introduce Observable Belief Memory (OBM) as a constructive epistemic governance architecture, combining the current epistemic quotient, belief over quotient classes, and within-class provenance through a posterior-consistent update. Controlled experiments demonstrate that explicit epistemic tracking improves robustness under changing observation conditions, particularly when class-level correspondence becomes insufficient. These results suggest that self-maintaining intelligent systems may benefit from reasoning not only about hidden states, but also about the evolving validity of the representations through which those states become knowable.