SafeCommit: Certifying When Memory-Grounded Agents May Safely Act

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 4 Aug 2026] SafeCommit: Certifying When Memory-Grounded Agents May Safely Act Mayur Akewar, Ravi Ranjan Long-horizon agents increasingly use persistent memory and tools to take actions with external side effects. A central failure mode is premature commitment: an agent acts before resolving whether its memory grounding is stale, conflicting, incomplete, or corrupted. We formalize this problem as safe commitment under memory uncertainty and introduce SafeCommit, a risk controlled layer between agent reasoning and external execution. The layer constructs a calibrated set of plausible latent worlds from memory, observations, tool outputs, provenance, and policy constraints. It permits a side effectful action only when a conformal action certificate shows that the action is safe in every retained world. Otherwise, it selects a low-side-effect probe that targets the worlds blocking certification, or returns a conservative fallback. Under calibrated world coverage, the probability of an unsafe certified commit is at most the target level {\alpha}; with imperfect world proposal, the bound separates calibration and representation error. A dependency-free controlled simulator illustrates the safety-utility tradeoff and reproduces all reported results with one command. The goal is to offer a concrete approach for deciding not only what an agent should do, but when the available evidence is sufficient to safely do it. Comments: 14 pages, 6 tables, and 1 figure, target NeurIPS Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2608.04289 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2608.04289v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04289 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ravi Ranjan Kumar [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 23:44:35 UTC (25 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)