cs.LGJul 14, 2026

Track, Rank, Crack: Epistemic Working Memory Scales Multi-Hop Reasoning in Language Agents

Authors: Ning Liu

Organizations: Independent Researcher

Abstract

Language agents that interleave reasoning and tool use degrade sharply as reasoning chains lengthen, even when each individual step is easy. We trace this to context dilution: an agent's investigative state (what it has confirmed, what it suspects, and what it still needs) lives only implicitly in a growing context window, where early discoveries are buried under later retrievals. We introduce SLEUTH, which makes this state explicit and actionable through a structured epistemic working memory: the agent maintains Confirmed Facts grounded to sources, Active Hypotheses ranked by evidence, and Open Questions that directly drive its next action. Across five multi-hop benchmarks and five established baselines, SLEUTH's advantage grows with difficulty, from +5 points on HotpotQA to +11 on 4-hop chains, surpassing Reflexion without multiple episodes. Analyzing where the remaining gap lies, we identify the evidence sufficiency problem: agents often find the answer but fail to commit, exhausting their budget on needless verification. A lightweight commitment trigger fixes this, but only when the agent already maintains structured state: the identical trigger applied to an unstructured agent yields no improvement, isolating organized epistemic state as the necessary condition for effective commitment. Finally, enforcing protocol adherence on a weaker model recovers up to +19 points on the hardest problems, showing that how an agent organizes its reasoning, not raw model capability, is the active ingredient for scaling multi-hop reasoning.

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