Retention Consequence in Lifecycle Memory Control
About
Persistent memory can fail after successful admission: a premise is written, then becomes a silent assumption, and later maintenance treats it as ordinary residue to be compressed, demoted, or evicted. We study this post-admission failure as a lifecycle-control problem. Existing memory systems already perform admission, update, compression, retrieval, and eviction. Our claim is not that such systems lack maintenance, but that retention consequence is often operationalized only indirectly through validity, similarity, recency, frequency, importance, or summarization signals rather than exposed as a separate lifecycle state. We therefore treat confidence as carried-forward validity/support evidence, and introduce strength as an explicit lifecycle state for retention consequence. We operationalize this distinction in StageMem, a small staged controller whose transient, working, and durable stores expose promotion, compression, and eviction pressure points. Across controlled premise-realization, compression, pressure, and implicit-heuristic diagnostics, the experiments separate writing too little, retaining the wrong high-cue content, forgetting costly premises, and preserving everything by saturation. Explicit retention consequence, used through lifecycle settlement, provides a control surface between omission and hoarding. For the targeted post-admission failure mode, the results support a lifecycle view of persistent memory: reliability depends not only on what enters memory, but on whether admission validity and retention consequence remain available during maintenance.