Stateless Decision Memory
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Most interesting AI agent papers right now are about capability. This one is about plumbing, and it is probably more important than it looks. Stateful agents do not scale horizontally. The moment you need thousands of concurrent agent instances running across containers, persistent per-agent state becomes the bottleneck. This paper proposes replacing active memory with immutable decision logs using event-sourcing principles from distributed systems.
Decision logs instead of live state: Every agent decision, tool call, and observation is appended to an immutable event log. Any instance can reconstruct context by replaying the log on demand, which decouples decision logic from storage and lets agents spin up anywhere with no warmup.
Enterprise properties by design: Compared to summary-only, SAM, and vector-memory baselines, Decision Process Memory (DPM) is the only architecture that supports append-only logging, stateless projection, audit-ready rationale trails, replay from log alone, multi-tenant isolation, and per-event provenance. Each of these is a hard requirement in regulated enterprise deployments.
Tight-budget performance wins: On FRP, RCS, and EDA evaluations under constrained memory budgets, DPM substantially outperforms summary-only memory, with the gap widening as the budget tightens. Under loose budgets the approaches converge, which is the expected pattern once scale is no longer the constraint.
A blueprint for regulated deployments: For teams operationalizing agents in finance, healthcare, or other compliance-heavy industries, the paper reads as a practical specification. It maps existing distributed-systems discipline onto agent memory instead of inventing a new category, which is why it is likely to age well.
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