Authority Before Utility: Non-Compensatory Control for Persistent LLM Memory

Abstract

Persistent memory creates a control problem that retrieval relevance alone does not solve: a memory can remain highly useful after an update, deletion, or revocation makes it inadmissible for the current answer. We formalize this as a separation between utility and authority. A fixed finite penalty applied to an unnormalized utility score cannot guarantee exclusion under arbitrary positive-affine reparameterization of that score; by contrast, rank-normalized compensation is scale-invariant and therefore forms a stronger empirical comparator. Our prospectively frozen TIDE/LongMemEval primary was quarantined before a valid HELDOUT comparison because the materialized TIDE adapter conflated historical age with query-relative inadmissibility and the aligned LongMemEval split left no DEV set for the predeclared penalty selection. We therefore report a post-primary replacement diagnostic on Memora Remembering, where update/delete operations provide item-level forgetting state. On Qwen3-8B, DEV selected lambda = 0.6 from a ten-point normalized SOFT family. Across 185 HELDOUT units in 28 dependency clusters, HARD exclusion yields 4.04% balanced construct error versus 19.66% for locked SOFT, a paired difference of 15.61 points with a 20,000-replicate cluster-bootstrap 95% interval of [13.07, 18.76]. The effect is driven primarily by forgotten-value leakage while current-value recall is preserved. This is same-Q operator-comparison evidence, not a universal claim that scalar control fails, not an evaluation of learned authority inference, and not an independent downstream-harm endpoint.