MELD Gives Federated Agent Memories a Merge Protocol: 0.968 AUC, 0.013 False-Merge Rate, and Contradictions Preserved Rather Than Overwritten

arXiv 2608.16357·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

MELD addresses a gap in the agent stack — agents share transport and can call each other's tools, but have no way to reconcile a fact phrased two ways or resolve contradictory knowledge without silently dropping a claim. Every incoming claim passes a five-outcome procedure (insert, merge, relate, conflict, reject) decided from scoped claim-key identity, embedding similarity and an NLI verdict, mutating state only through one authenticated Patch. On HotpotQA distractor the distributed merge is recall-non-inferior to a centralized store at about 11% less live storage; the status CRDT reconverges in 30/30 partition-heal trials where last-writer-wins manages 11/30, and semantic routing delivers ~3x fewer messages at matched recall.