Toward Knowledge-Centric AI: Discovering, Internalizing, and Using Explicit Knowledge Across Agents and Generations
Yisen Gao, Haoyu Huang, Zhongwei Xie, Yufei Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Boyi Zhang, Qiao Xiao, Tianshi Zheng, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song
Abstract
Knowledge is how understanding accumulates across people and generations: durable records that outlive their producers and that others can check, combine, teach, and correct. AI agents are now built and run by many independent users and organizations, and each agent is upgraded, replaced, or retired within months. Yet what an agent learns stays trapped in model parameters, a transient context window, or a system-specific memory store that is appended to and retrieved from rather than processed. We argue that the next generation of AI should be knowledge-centric, built around an explicit, continuously evolving knowledge layer independent of any single agent. In this loop, agents discover knowledge from their environments and trajectories; the layer internalizes it by turning fragmented, heterogeneous records and experience into composable, revisable understanding; and agents across systems and generations use the result and return new outcomes for revision. While discovery and use have advanced rapidly with large language model agents, internalization remains the bottleneck. We argue that internalization should become a persistent object of training and maintenance-centered on condition-preserving conceptualization of events and deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning across noisy, heterogeneous representations (text, tables, graphs, rules, and programs). To power this layer, we call for knowledge foundation models that provide shared neural capacity for knowledge computation, and outline a research agenda showing how an explicit knowledge layer delivers reuse, cost efficiency, auditability, and continuity across agent generations.