Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into photo applications on personal devices, making editing photographs easier than ever while potentially influencing the memories they represent. This study explores how and why people use GenAI to edit personal photos and how this shapes their remembering experience. We conducted a two-phase qualitative study with 12 participants: a photo editing session using a GenAI tool guided by the Remembering Experience (RX) dimensions, followed by semi-structured interviews where participants reflected on the editing process and results. Findings show that participants prioritised felt memory over factual accuracy. For different photo elements, environments were modified easily, however, editing was deemed unacceptable if it touched upon a person's identity. Editing processes brought positive and negative impacts, and itself also became a remembering experience. We further discuss potential benefits and risks of GenAI editing for remembering purposes and propose design implications for responsible GenAI.
Functional affordance grounding requires more than recognizing an object: an agent must localize the specific region that supports an interaction, such as the handle to pull or the button to press. This is difficult for training-free vision-language pipelines because actionable regions are often small, visually ambiguous, and repeated across multiple same-category instances in a scene. We propose AFFORDMEM, a framework that grounds 3D functional affordances by remembering geometry at two levels. The first is cross-scene affordance memory: the agent maintains a category-level memory bank of RGB images with affordance regions rendered as overlays, and recalls the most informative examples at query time to guide a frozen VLM toward small operable subregions that text-only prompting consistently misses. The second is in-scene spatial memory: as the agent processes the scene, it organizes candidate instances and their 3D spatial relations into a structured scene graph, enabling the language model to resolve references over distant or currently unobserved candidates such as "the second handle from the top." AFFORDMEM requires no model fine-tuning and no target-scene annotation, using a r
We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food. Moreover, the world is non-stationary: from day to day, the location of the barriers and food may change, and the agent's sensing such as its location information is uncertain and very limited. Any model construction, such as a map, and use, such as planning, needs to be robust against these challenges, and if any learning is to be useful, it needs to be adequately fast. We look at a range of strategies, from simple to sophisticated, with various uses of memory and learning. We find that an architecture that can incorporate multiple strategies is required to handle (sub)tasks of a different nature, in particular for exploration and search, when food location is not known, and for planning a good path to a remembered (likely) food location. An agent that utilizes non-stationary probability learning techniques to keep updating its (episodic) memories and that uses those memories to build maps and plan on the fly (imperfect maps, i.e. noisy and limited to
The ways people remember and recall places reveal an invisible aspect of cultural heritage (CH), reflecting how individuals and communities relate to these places. Heritage is communal, emerging through collaboratively constructed narratives rather than individual records. To probe how people may share collective memories, we designed an immersive two-person workflow for collaboratively co-designing 3D artifacts and environments in virtual heritage locations, using Generative AI (GenAI) to instantiate these intangible memories. Observations of the co-creation process revealed that participants merged prompts and model placements when negotiating different perspectives. They used spatial operations to compose scenes, and also to express personal and embodied experiences of CH. When GenAI failed to meet their needs, participants engaged in creative appropriation, re-purposing unsatisfactory generated objects as sources of design inspiration to further shared narratives. While GenAI may have a homogenizing effect on CH expression, this work shows how people may overcome limitations in immersive collaborative workflows.
In this work we introduce a novel approach to domain incremental learning, adapting models over time to evolving, non-stationary data. In contrast to other works, we do not attempt to avoid catastrophic forgetting, but rather allow it and exploit it. Our model combines a main task head with a self-supervised masked autoencoder (MAE) head. We then learn domain-specific LoRA adapters during incremental training. Each adapter specializes to its domain, naturally inducing forgetting on other domains in both heads. At inference, we perform online test-time training on the self-supervised MAE head to identify which LoRAs best matches the current input, so the model can `remember' the domain again. Our scheme is especially well-suited to real-world streaming data, such as video, where consecutive samples are highly correlated and domain shifts are gradual. We demonstrate our method on domain-incremental action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized numerous research fields and applications. Despite their widespread success, a fundamental limitation known as catastrophic forgetting remains, where models fail to retain their ability to perform previously learned tasks after being trained on new ones. This limitation is particularly acute in certain continual learning scenarios, where models must integrate the knowledge from new domains with their existing capabilities. Traditional approaches to mitigate this problem typically rely on memory replay mechanisms, storing either original data samples, prototypes, or activation patterns. Although effective, these methods often introduce significant computational overhead, raise privacy concerns, and require the use of dedicated architectures. In this work we present ReReLRP (Remembering and Recognizing with LRP), a novel solution that leverages Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to preserve information across tasks. Our contribution provides increased privacy of existing replay-free methods while additionally offering built-in explainability, flexibility of model architecture and deployment, and a new mechanism to increase memory storage ef
We study the Takagi-van der Waerden functions $f_r (x)$, a well-known class of continuous but nowhere differentiable functions, from probabilistic point of view. As an application of elephant random walks remembering the very recent past (ERWVRP, a.k.a. symmetric correlated random walks), we obtain precise estimates for the oscillations of $f_r (x)$. We also establish a result on the necessary and sufficient condition for localization of the ERWVRP with variable step length, which can be applied to obtain a complete description of the differentiability properties of the Takagi-van der Waerden class functions.
The proliferation of web agents necessitates advanced navigation and interaction strategies within complex web environments. Current models often struggle with efficient navigation and action execution due to limited visibility and understanding of web structures. Our proposed R2D2 framework addresses these challenges by integrating two paradigms: Remember and Reflect. The Remember paradigm uses a replay buffer that aids agents in reconstructing the web environment dynamically, thus enabling the formulation of a detailed "map" of previously visited pages. This helps in reducing navigational errors and optimizing the decision-making process during web interactions. Conversely, the Reflect paradigm allows agents to learn from past mistakes by providing a mechanism for error analysis and strategy refinement, enhancing overall task performance. We evaluate R2D2 using the WebArena benchmark, demonstrating substantial improvements over existing methods, including a 50% reduction in navigation errors and a threefold increase in task completion rates. Our findings suggest that a combination of memory-enhanced navigation and reflective learning promisingly advances the capabilities of web a
Copulas are a fundamental tool for modelling multivariate dependencies in data, forming the method of choice in diverse fields and applications. However, the adoption of existing models for multimodal and high-dimensional dependencies is hindered by restrictive assumptions and poor scaling. In this work, we present methods for modelling copulas based on the principles of diffusions and flows. We design two processes that progressively forget inter-variable dependencies while leaving dimension-wise distributions unaffected, provably defining valid copulas at all times. We show how to obtain copula models by learning to remember the forgotten dependencies from each process, theoretically recovering the true copula at optimality. The first instantiation of our framework focuses on direct density estimation, while the second specialises in expedient sampling. Empirically, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methods over state-of-the-art copula approaches in modelling complex and high-dimensional dependencies from scientific datasets and images. Our work enhances the representational power of copula models, empowering applications and paving the way for their adoptio
Neural networks encounter the challenge of Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) in continual learning, where new task learning interferes with previously learned knowledge. Existing data fine-tuning and regularization methods necessitate task identity information during inference and cannot eliminate interference among different tasks, while soft parameter sharing approaches encounter the problem of an increasing model parameter size. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Remembering Transformer, inspired by the brain's Complementary Learning Systems (CLS). Remembering Transformer employs a mixture-of-adapters architecture and a generative model-based novelty detection mechanism in a pretrained Transformer to alleviate CF. Remembering Transformer dynamically routes task data to the most relevant adapter with enhanced parameter efficiency based on knowledge distillation. We conducted extensive experiments, including ablation studies on the novelty detection mechanism and model capacity of the mixture-of-adapters, in a broad range of class-incremental split tasks and permutation tasks. Our approach demonstrated SOTA performance surpassing the second-best method by 15.90% in the split ta
Humans can learn individual episodes and generalizable rules and also successfully retain both kinds of acquired knowledge over time. In the cognitive science literature, (1) learning individual episodes and rules and (2) learning and remembering are often both conceptualized as competing processes that necessitate separate, complementary learning systems. Inspired by recent research in statistical learning, we challenge these trade-offs, hypothesizing that they arise from capacity limitations rather than from the inherent incompatibility of the underlying cognitive processes. Using an associative learning task, we show that one system with excess representational capacity can learn and remember both episodes and rules.
Graph data in real-world scenarios undergo rapid and frequent changes, making it challenging for existing graph models to effectively handle the continuous influx of new data and accommodate data withdrawal requests. The approach to frequently retraining graph models is resource intensive and impractical. To address this pressing challenge, this paper introduces a new concept of graph memory learning. Its core idea is to enable a graph model to selectively remember new knowledge but forget old knowledge. Building on this approach, the paper presents a novel graph memory learning framework - Brain-inspired Graph Memory Learning (BGML), inspired by brain network dynamics and function-structure coupling strategies. BGML incorporates a multi-granular hierarchical progressive learning mechanism rooted in feature graph grain learning to mitigate potential conflict between memorization and forgetting in graph memory learning. This mechanism allows for a comprehensive and multi-level perception of local details within evolving graphs. In addition, to tackle the issue of unreliable structures in newly added incremental information, the paper introduces an information self-assessment ownersh
Much of what we remember is not due to intentional selection, but simply a by-product of perceiving. This raises a foundational question about the architecture of the mind: How does perception interface with and influence memory? Here, inspired by a classic proposal relating perceptual processing to memory durability, the level-of-processing theory, we present a sparse coding model for compressing feature embeddings of images, and show that the reconstruction residuals from this model predict how well images are encoded into memory. In an open memorability dataset of scene images, we show that reconstruction error not only explains memory accuracy but also response latencies during retrieval, subsuming, in the latter case, all of the variance explained by powerful vision-only models. We also confirm a prediction of this account with 'model-driven psychophysics'. This work establishes reconstruction error as a novel signal interfacing perception and memory, possibly through adaptive modulation of perceptual processing.
We propose ResRep, a novel method for lossless channel pruning (a.k.a. filter pruning), which slims down a CNN by reducing the width (number of output channels) of convolutional layers. Inspired by the neurobiology research about the independence of remembering and forgetting, we propose to re-parameterize a CNN into the remembering parts and forgetting parts, where the former learn to maintain the performance and the latter learn to prune. Via training with regular SGD on the former but a novel update rule with penalty gradients on the latter, we realize structured sparsity. Then we equivalently merge the remembering and forgetting parts into the original architecture with narrower layers. In this sense, ResRep can be viewed as a successful application of Structural Re-parameterization. Such a methodology distinguishes ResRep from the traditional learning-based pruning paradigm that applies a penalty on parameters to produce sparsity, which may suppress the parameters essential for the remembering. ResRep slims down a standard ResNet-50 with 76.15% accuracy on ImageNet to a narrower one with only 45% FLOPs and no accuracy drop, which is the first to achieve lossless pruning with s
Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks is a significant problem for continual learning. A majority of the current methods replay previous data during training, which violates the constraints of an ideal continual learning system. Additionally, current approaches that deal with forgetting ignore the problem of catastrophic remembering, i.e. the worsening ability to discriminate between data from different tasks. In our work, we introduce Relevance Mapping Networks (RMNs) which are inspired by the Optimal Overlap Hypothesis. The mappings reflects the relevance of the weights for the task at hand by assigning large weights to essential parameters. We show that RMNs learn an optimized representational overlap that overcomes the twin problem of catastrophic forgetting and remembering. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all common continual learning datasets, even significantly outperforming data replay methods while not violating the constraints for an ideal continual learning system. Moreover, RMNs retain the ability to detect data from new tasks in an unsupervised manner, thus proving their resilience against catastrophic remembering.
Long-term memory systems for Large Language Model (LLM) agents typically try to \emph{remember everything}, extracting memories uniformly to retain as many facts as possible. In production, however, inference cost and finite context budgets make this untenable: beyond consolidating raw dialogue into memory, an agent must exert \emph{write control}, efficiently keeping only the information each user actually cares about. Otherwise, long-horizon personalized interactions suffer \emph{memory bloat}, where irrelevant trivia crowds out useful information and steadily erodes question-answering (QA) accuracy. We argue that what is worth remembering is role-dependent, and propose \textbf{AdaMem} (Adaptive Memory), a method that \emph{learns what to remember} for each user from feedback. AdaMem maintains a structured, role-specific Memory Policy and refines it from weekly QA feedback through a lightweight, patch-style self-reflection step with failure rollback. To study this setting, we build \textbf{AdaMem-Bench}, a benchmark that simulates weeks of interaction with week-by-week QA. Across two extraction models and two feedback modes, AdaMem improves QA accuracy by up to \textbf{+9.0\%} ov
Understanding how travelers form overall evaluations of public transport journeys is critical for improving travel satisfaction and encouraging sustainable mode choice. While travel satisfaction is discussed to influence attitudes and future behavior, the cognitive rules by which moment-to-moment experiences are aggregated into retrospective evaluations remain poorly understood in transport research. Drawing on psychological theories of experienced and remembered utility, this study investigates which temporal aggregation heuristics best predict post-trip travel satisfaction. Using a smartphone-based experience sampling approach, we collected high-frequency on-trip experience ratings and post-trip evaluations for 2576 real-world public transport trips across three German cities. Travel experience was assessed every five minutes during trips using a multi-item scale, allowing direct comparison of competing aggregation rules, including mean experience, peak-end, minimum-end, final moment, and trip duration. Multilevel regression models were estimated to evaluate the explanatory power of each heuristic. Results show that retrospective travel satisfaction is best predicted by a Minimum
Human memory is reconstructive, not a faithful recording. Current multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) lack this capability: they process images through a frozen visual encoder, produce a one-shot text output, and discard internal representations. We present DoYouRemember, a three-stage architecture introducing reconstructive memory into MLLMs: (1) a VQ-VAE compresses images into discrete visual tokens, (2) a LoRA-fine-tuned LLM jointly attends to visual and text tokens, and (3) a Diffusion Decoder reconstructs images from the LLM's hidden states. On 1,000 3D facial skin texture maps and 99,000 unlabeled facial images, we find that LLM hidden states contain approximately zero recoverable visual information -- the same Decoder producing clear reconstructions from VQ-VAE tokens (pre-LLM) produces pure noise from LLM hidden states (post-LLM), demonstrating that the LLM understands images but does not remember them. Training a shared memory matrix M under backpropagation systematically fails due to gradient cancellation (O(1/sqrt(N)) attenuation). We identify three root causes and show that local EMA updating resolves all three: each image updates only its top-8 slots out of 64, preserving inter-sl
This paper presents "Remember Me, Not Save Me," an AR & AI system enabling virtual citizens to develop personality through collective dialogue. Core innovations include: Dynamic Collective Memory (DCM) model with narrative tension mechanisms for handling contradictory memories; State-Reflective Avatar for ambient explainability; and Geo-Cultural Context Anchoring for local identity. Deployed at the 2024 Jinan Biennale, the system demonstrated stable personality emergence (ISTP type via Apply Magic Sauce analysis) from over 2,500 public interactions. We provide a framework for designing evolving digital entities that transform collective memory into coherent identity.
Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios. These scenarios require models to handle sparse evidence, long-range dependencies, multimodal alignment, and reliable inference under limited computational budgets. This work presents a human-view perspective on LLM-based video understanding, organized around three functional abilities: watching, remembering, and reasoning. Rather than treating video tasks as isolated benchmarks, this view provides a unified structure for analyzing how video MLLMs acquire evidence, preserve context, and produce grounded outputs. We introduce a formulation that characterizes video understanding systems by their perceptual representations, memory states, reasoning traces, and final predictions. Based on this formulation, we identify challenges in spatio-temporal perception, efficient long-video processing, memory modeling, streaming understanding, and faithful reasoning. Representative methods are organized by their roles in video MLLM systems. Watching covers fine-grained, comprehensive, audio-visual, and effici