Rashomon Memory: Towards Argumentation-Driven Retrieval for Multi-Perspective Agent Memory

AI agents operating over extended time horizons accumulate experiences that serve multiple concurrent goals, and must often maintain conflicting interpretations of the same events. A concession during a client negotiation encodes as a ``trust-building investment'' for one strategic goal and a ``contractual liability'' for another. Current memory architectures assume a single correct encoding, or at best support multiple views over unified storage. We propose Rashomon Memory: an architecture where parallel goal-conditioned agents encode experiences according to their priorities and negotiate at query time through argumentation. Each perspective maintains its own ontology and knowledge graph. At retrieval, perspectives propose interpretations, critique each other's proposals using asymmetric domain knowledge, and Dung's argumentation semantics determines which proposals survive. The resulting attack graph is itself an explanation: it records which interpretation was selected, which alternatives were considered, and on what grounds they were rejected. We present a proof-of-concept showing that retrieval modes (selection, composition, conflict surfacing) emerge from attack graph topology, and that the conflict surfacing mode, where the system reports genuine disagreement rather than forcing resolution, lets decision-makers see the underlying interpretive conflict directly.

Structured Decomposition for LLM Reasoning: Cross-Domain Validation and Semantic Web Integration

Rule-based reasoning over natural language input arises in domains where decisions must be auditable and justifiable: clinical protocols specify eligibility criteria in prose, evidence rules define admissibility through textual conditions, and scientific standards dictate methodological requirements. Applying rules to such inputs demands both interpretive flexibility and formal guarantees. Large language models (LLMs) provide flexibility but cannot ensure consistent rule application; symbolic systems provide guarantees but require structured input. This paper presents an integration pattern that combines these strengths: LLMs serve as ontology population engines, translating unstructured text into ABox assertions according to expert-authored TBox specifications, while SWRL-based reasoners apply rules with deterministic guarantees. The framework decomposes reasoning into entity identification, assertion extraction, and symbolic verification, with task definitions grounded in OWL 2 ontologies. Experiments across three domains (legal hearsay determination, scientific method-task application, clinical trial eligibility) and eleven language models validate the approach. Structured decomposition achieves statistically significant improvements over few-shot prompting in aggregate, with gains observed across all three domains. An ablation study confirms that symbolic verification provides substantial benefit beyond structured prompting alone. The populated ABox integrates with standard semantic web tooling for inspection and querying, positioning the framework for richer inference patterns that simpler formalisms cannot express.