Remove a retracted document from a knowledge graph and its influence can survive in merged entities, inferred edges and summaries. Deleting the original facts is only the first step.
The October 13 PolyGraph paper asks constructors to attach evidence bundles when they create derived artifacts. Cleanup can then follow those dependencies. Its audit also finds that summary-level receipts can be unreliable when several sentence-level claims are collapsed into one evidence list. Read the research paper.
Provenance needs the same granularity as the claim
A paragraph may contain one sentence supported by a deleted source and another supported independently. A single citation list cannot express which sentence should survive.
The study's re-derivation experiments test whether receipts correspond to what the constructor actually needs. That is stronger than accepting a model's provenance explanation at face value, though it remains tied to the evaluated constructors and corpora.
For an agent memory pipeline, retain dependencies at creation rather than trying to reconstruct them during an emergency correction. Also test deletion against downstream answers, not just database rows.
The surprising cost of cheap memory construction is maintenance. A system that can create knowledge rapidly needs equally explicit machinery for withdrawing it without destroying independently supported information.
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