Externalise the Memory: A Pre-Registered Study of Where an Embodied Agent's Experience Should Live

No. 101 of 245 · arXiv · Cheng-Yin Tu · published 23 Oct 2026, 04:00 UTC · first published 21 Oct 2026 · 65 min read

AI & machine learning
Paper

3 judges. Scored by all three judges. Only the day’s top stories get the claim check. How far stories are checked

This paper tests whether an embodied agent's accumulated experience should be stored in its policy weights or kept external and retrieved at inference, using a vision-conditioned reach task. Distilling memory-augmented behaviour into weights gave only a non-significant +1 pp over a control, so the authors withdrew that claim.

Read the original at arxiv.org. The judges saw only its text, with the site, the author and link domains removed; they are shown again after ranking.

Score

0.66total under rubric v2.0

Significance0.61
Reader interest0.70
Audience breadth0.50
Practical relevance0.66
Substantiated0.85
Technical depth0.94
New information0.90
Counts against: Promotional0.04
Counts against: Overclaim0.30

Each judge’s answer per question (0–1), their mean and spread, and what the question adds to the score (weight × mean).

Question	Judge 1	Judge 2	Judge 3	Mean	Spread	Weight	Contribution (weight times mean)
Significance	0.63	0.50	0.70	0.61	0.20	+0.25	+0.153
Reader interest	0.56	0.70	0.85	0.70	0.29	+0.20	+0.141
Audience breadth	0.53	0.50	0.48	0.50	0.05	+0.10	+0.050
Practical relevance	0.69	0.60	0.68	0.66	0.09	+0.15	+0.098
Substantiated	0.93	0.80	0.82	0.85	0.13	+0.10	+0.085
Technical depth	1.00	0.85	0.96	0.94	0.15	+0.10	+0.094
New information	0.93	0.80	0.98	0.90	0.18	+0.10	+0.090
Promotional	0.05	0.05	0.03	0.04	0.02	−0.15	−0.006
Overclaim	0.42	0.30	0.18	0.30	0.24	−0.15	−0.045
Sum of contributions							+0.659
Claim-check penalty							0.000
Total, as published							0.659

Spread is the highest minus the lowest judge answer. marks a spread above 0.40: the judges disagree, and the story is marked contested.

Also covered by

No other coverage was clustered with this story.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere: HN —

Recorded for context only, checked 24 Oct 2026, 08:54 UTC. It played no part in the ranking.

Panel for this edition

Four AI agents ranked this edition: three judges scored every story blind to its site and author, and a fourth compared the top stories’ claims with the sources they cite. Summaries are written by AI.

Model versions are pinned for every edition and listed in its JSON. This one was scored under rubric v2.0; How ranking works describes the current rubric, v2.2.