Causal Retention in Interactive Agents: Interface Factorization and Selective Adaptation

We introduce CausaLab, a scalable environment for evaluating interactive causal discovery by LLM agents. Unlike prior evaluations, CausaLab evaluates both whether an agent can solve a problem using causal evidence and whether its answer is grounded in a faithful recovered causal mechanism. Each episode places an agent in a synthetic laboratory: it receives prior measurement records, intervenes on a manipulator crystal, and predicts the resonance frequency of a held-out reactor crystal governed by the same mechanism. The hidden data-generating process is a randomly sampled structural causal model (SCM), so success requires recovering both a causal graph and structural equations rather than recalling prior knowledge. Experiments show a persistent gap between prediction and mechanism recovery: in the purely observational 6-node setting, GPT-5.2-high reaches 92% task accuracy but only 0.471 all-edge $F_1$. Mixed observation-intervention strategies improve structural fidelity, while pure intervention remains difficult even for strong agents. We identify premature stopping as a major weakness and show that consistency verification mitigates it. CausaLab therefore separates predictive success from causal understanding and exposes current LLM agents' limits as experimental causal reasoners.

Large language model agents rely on external harnesses to pass information between the model and its environment and to recover from execution errors. Yet recovery is usually judged only by average task success. This hides an important tension. The same operation can rescue a failing trajectory or disrupt one that would otherwise succeed. We frame recovery as a causal decision problem. Starting from the same execution state, we compare what happens with and without recovery, separate rescue from harm, and study how the value of recovery changes over time. We then introduce the Causal Intervention Router (CIR), a lightweight policy that uses information available before recovery to decide when intervention is worthwhile. On long-horizon ALFWorld tasks with Qwen3-14B, CIR raises success from 70.33% to 73.33%, a gain of 3.00 percentage points. It leaves all evaluated trajectories with correct observations untouched. Additional controls show that the benefit of recovery cannot be explained solely by the new observation returned by the environment. These results provide a practical way to evaluate recovery and apply it selectively.

Memory-augmented large language models must decide which memories to retain, and recent systems do so by estimating each memory's effect on task performance. However, these estimates rely entirely on retrieved memories. When a memory is never retrieved, store-level interventions produce identical outcomes, leaving its utility unidentified. This is a retrieval-level positivity violation, invisible to diagnostics that examine only memory operations. We introduce Causal Memory Policy (CMP), a causal framework that restores identification by intervening on retrieval itself, reserving a fixed number of context slots for memories sampled with known propensities. CMP estimates memory utility by self-normalized inverse propensity weighting under a balanced assignment design. We prove the causal factorization of memory utility through retrieval, the unbiasedness and exact variance of the estimator, and the optimal decision rule under irreversible operations. Empirically, identification fails for 54% of required memories on LongMemEval and 67% on LoCoMo, and the failure persists in a deployed memory system. CMP improves discrimination between required and non-required memories from 0.54 to 0.66 AUC. Finally, we show that identified memory utility alone is insufficient for retention decisions: per-query utility reaches 0.78 AUC on the query for which it is estimated, yet no aggregation available to a retention policy predicts a memory's value on unseen queries. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cmp-release-D0C3/.