When Regulation Has Memory: Hysteresis and Control Burden in Artificial Agency

Abstract: Adaptive agents are usually judged by what they do, but an agent can appear stable while the internal effort required to keep it stable is increasing. This hidden regulatory burden matters for artificial agents operating under noise, delay, or changing demands: two systems may reach similar internal states while one requires much more corrective control to get there. Here, we study whether that burden depends on history. Using a computational model of adaptive uncertainty regulation, we drive an artificial agent through a continuous change in its uncertainty target and then reverse the change without resetting the agent. This creates a simple test for carryover: does the controller respond only to the current target, or does the path by which the agent reached that target still matter? The simulations show a clear history-dependent effect. The adaptive gain required to regulate the agent forms a reproducible hysteresis loop, meaning that the same target can require different levels of control depending on whether the agent is moving toward or returning from a more demanding regime. The timing of regulation also matters. When stabilization is available before disturbance exposure, the agent generally requires less adaptive gain than when it can only recover after disturbance has already acted. The state-level coherence measure also shows path dependence, but the timing effect is much clearer in regulatory gain. The main difference is therefore not that anticipatory regulation produces a completely different state. Rather, it reaches comparable regulated behavior with lower modeled control demand. These results suggest that adaptive agents should be evaluated not only by whether they remain organized, but by how much regulation they must recruit to do so.