Claims

Similarity-based retrieval degrades as the Knowledge Base grows, consistent with the fan effect, stalling the agent

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · design r2 · q1
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · recheck by 2029: tool and model accuracy changes quickly

Subclaims

Reading the evidence codes

q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.

This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.

q1 i? As the Knowledge Base grew, similarity-based retrieval increasingly failed to surface newly added Declarative Memories, consistent with the fan effect, causing the agent to stall even after 150 iterations; in several cases the agent retrieved entirely irrelevant knowledge, consistent with deceptive overgeneralization. → Hyeongdon Moon 2026

Evidence

Hyeongdon Moon 2026

Hyeongdon Moon, Carolyn Rosé, and John Stamper. (2026). Cognitive Agent Compilation for Explicit Problem Solver Modeling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07040 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.07040

q1 · i? · design · r2

Observation from the proof-of-concept run (Section 6.2); this issue was the primary reason the experiment was terminated at the 28th problem. The authors report retrieval failures "consistent with the fan effect" and note a more selective retrieval mechanism is needed. No effect sizes are printed.

"As the KB grew, similarity-based retrieval increasingly failed to surface newly added DMs, consistent with the fan effect [4] in which retrieval accuracy degrades as more items share overlapping cues. This caused the agent to stall even after 150 iterations."

Discussion

Page metadata
Field Value
type claim
id fan-effect-kb-growth-retrieval-degradation
title Similarity-based retrieval degrades as the Knowledge Base grows, consistent with the fan effect, stalling the agent
description Similarity-based retrieval degrades as the Knowledge Base grows, consistent with the fan effect, stalling the agent
status review
evidence_strength weak
newest_evidence 2026
recheck_by 2029
generated by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-11
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — hyeongdon-moon-2026

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