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Dec 10

MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation

Temporal context is essential for robotic manipulation because such tasks are inherently non-Markovian, yet mainstream VLA models typically overlook it and struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived representations for immediate control, while the hippocampal system preserves verbatim episodic details and semantic gist of past experience for long-term memory. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose MemoryVLA, a Cognition-Memory-Action framework for long-horizon robotic manipulation. A pretrained VLM encodes the observation into perceptual and cognitive tokens that form working memory, while a Perceptual-Cognitive Memory Bank stores low-level details and high-level semantics consolidated from it. Working memory retrieves decision-relevant entries from the bank, adaptively fuses them with current tokens, and updates the bank by merging redundancies. Using these tokens, a memory-conditioned diffusion action expert yields temporally aware action sequences. We evaluate MemoryVLA on 150+ simulation and real-world tasks across three robots. On SimplerEnv-Bridge, Fractal, and LIBERO-5 suites, it achieves 71.9%, 72.7%, and 96.5% success rates, respectively, all outperforming state-of-the-art baselines CogACT and pi-0, with a notable +14.6 gain on Bridge. On 12 real-world tasks spanning general skills and long-horizon temporal dependencies, MemoryVLA achieves 84.0% success rate, with long-horizon tasks showing a +26 improvement over state-of-the-art baseline. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/MemoryVLA

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 26

CAIM: Development and Evaluation of a Cognitive AI Memory Framework for Long-Term Interaction with Intelligent Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and are a powerful enabler for interactive systems. However, they still face challenges in long-term interactions that require adaptation towards the user as well as contextual knowledge and understanding of the ever-changing environment. To overcome these challenges, holistic memory modeling is required to efficiently retrieve and store relevant information across interaction sessions for suitable responses. Cognitive AI, which aims to simulate the human thought process in a computerized model, highlights interesting aspects, such as thoughts, memory mechanisms, and decision-making, that can contribute towards improved memory modeling for LLMs. Inspired by these cognitive AI principles, we propose our memory framework CAIM. CAIM consists of three modules: 1.) The Memory Controller as the central decision unit; 2.) the Memory Retrieval, which filters relevant data for interaction upon request; and 3.) the Post-Thinking, which maintains the memory storage. We compare CAIM against existing approaches, focusing on metrics such as retrieval accuracy, response correctness, contextual coherence, and memory storage. The results demonstrate that CAIM outperforms baseline frameworks across different metrics, highlighting its context-awareness and potential to improve long-term human-AI interactions.

  • 4 authors
·
May 19

ComoRAG: A Cognitive-Inspired Memory-Organized RAG for Stateful Long Narrative Reasoning

Narrative comprehension on long stories and novels has been a challenging domain attributed to their intricate plotlines and entangled, often evolving relations among characters and entities. Given the LLM's diminished reasoning over extended context and high computational cost, retrieval-based approaches remain a pivotal role in practice. However, traditional RAG methods can fall short due to their stateless, single-step retrieval process, which often overlooks the dynamic nature of capturing interconnected relations within long-range context. In this work, we propose ComoRAG, holding the principle that narrative reasoning is not a one-shot process, but a dynamic, evolving interplay between new evidence acquisition and past knowledge consolidation, analogous to human cognition when reasoning with memory-related signals in the brain. Specifically, when encountering a reasoning impasse, ComoRAG undergoes iterative reasoning cycles while interacting with a dynamic memory workspace. In each cycle, it generates probing queries to devise new exploratory paths, then integrates the retrieved evidence of new aspects into a global memory pool, thereby supporting the emergence of a coherent context for the query resolution. Across four challenging long-context narrative benchmarks (200K+ tokens), ComoRAG outperforms strong RAG baselines with consistent relative gains up to 11% compared to the strongest baseline. Further analysis reveals that ComoRAG is particularly advantageous for complex queries requiring global comprehension, offering a principled, cognitively motivated paradigm for retrieval-based long context comprehension towards stateful reasoning. Our code is publicly released at https://github.com/EternityJune25/ComoRAG

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 14 2

Assessing Episodic Memory in LLMs with Sequence Order Recall Tasks

Current LLM benchmarks focus on evaluating models' memory of facts and semantic relations, primarily assessing semantic aspects of long-term memory. However, in humans, long-term memory also includes episodic memory, which links memories to their contexts, such as the time and place they occurred. The ability to contextualize memories is crucial for many cognitive tasks and everyday functions. This form of memory has not been evaluated in LLMs with existing benchmarks. To address the gap in evaluating memory in LLMs, we introduce Sequence Order Recall Tasks (SORT), which we adapt from tasks used to study episodic memory in cognitive psychology. SORT requires LLMs to recall the correct order of text segments, and provides a general framework that is both easily extendable and does not require any additional annotations. We present an initial evaluation dataset, Book-SORT, comprising 36k pairs of segments extracted from 9 books recently added to the public domain. Based on a human experiment with 155 participants, we show that humans can recall sequence order based on long-term memory of a book. We find that models can perform the task with high accuracy when relevant text is given in-context during the SORT evaluation. However, when presented with the book text only during training, LLMs' performance on SORT falls short. By allowing to evaluate more aspects of memory, we believe that SORT will aid in the emerging development of memory-augmented models.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

RoboMemory: A Brain-inspired Multi-memory Agentic Framework for Lifelong Learning in Physical Embodied Systems

We present RoboMemory, a brain-inspired multi-memory framework for lifelong learning in physical embodied systems, addressing critical challenges in real-world environments: continuous learning, multi-module memory latency, task correlation capture, and infinite-loop mitigation in closed-loop planning. Grounded in cognitive neuroscience, it integrates four core modules: the Information Preprocessor (thalamus-like), the Lifelong Embodied Memory System (hippocampus-like), the Closed-Loop Planning Module (prefrontal lobe-like), and the Low-Level Executer (cerebellum-like) to enable long-term planning and cumulative learning. The Lifelong Embodied Memory System, central to the framework, alleviates inference speed issues in complex memory frameworks via parallelized updates/retrieval across Spatial, Temporal, Episodic, and Semantic submodules. It incorporates a dynamic Knowledge Graph (KG) and consistent architectural design to enhance memory consistency and scalability. Evaluations on EmbodiedBench show RoboMemory outperforms the open-source baseline (Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Ins) by 25% in average success rate and surpasses the closed-source State-of-the-Art (SOTA) (Claude3.5-Sonnet) by 5%, establishing new SOTA. Ablation studies validate key components (critic, spatial memory, long-term memory), while real-world deployment confirms its lifelong learning capability with significantly improved success rates across repeated tasks. RoboMemory alleviates high latency challenges with scalability, serving as a foundational reference for integrating multi-modal memory systems in physical robots.

G-Memory: Tracing Hierarchical Memory for Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated cognitive and execution capabilities that far exceed those of single LLM agents, yet their capacity for self-evolution remains hampered by underdeveloped memory architectures. Upon close inspection, we are alarmed to discover that prevailing MAS memory mechanisms (1) are overly simplistic, completely disregarding the nuanced inter-agent collaboration trajectories, and (2) lack cross-trial and agent-specific customization, in stark contrast to the expressive memory developed for single agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce G-Memory, a hierarchical, agentic memory system for MAS inspired by organizational memory theory, which manages the lengthy MAS interaction via a three-tier graph hierarchy: insight, query, and interaction graphs. Upon receiving a new user query, G-Memory performs bi-directional memory traversal to retrieve both high-level, generalizable insights that enable the system to leverage cross-trial knowledge, and fine-grained, condensed interaction trajectories that compactly encode prior collaboration experiences. Upon task execution, the entire hierarchy evolves by assimilating new collaborative trajectories, nurturing the progressive evolution of agent teams. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks, three LLM backbones, and three popular MAS frameworks demonstrate that G-Memory improves success rates in embodied action and accuracy in knowledge QA by up to 20.89% and 10.12%, respectively, without any modifications to the original frameworks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/bingreeky/GMemory.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8

MINDSTORES: Memory-Informed Neural Decision Synthesis for Task-Oriented Reinforcement in Embodied Systems

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities as zero-shot planners for embodied agents, their inability to learn from experience and build persistent mental models limits their robustness in complex open-world environments like Minecraft. We introduce MINDSTORES, an experience-augmented planning framework that enables embodied agents to build and leverage mental models through natural interaction with their environment. Drawing inspiration from how humans construct and refine cognitive mental models, our approach extends existing zero-shot LLM planning by maintaining a database of past experiences that informs future planning iterations. The key innovation is representing accumulated experiences as natural language embeddings of (state, task, plan, outcome) tuples, which can then be efficiently retrieved and reasoned over by an LLM planner to generate insights and guide plan refinement for novel states and tasks. Through extensive experiments in the MineDojo environment, a simulation environment for agents in Minecraft that provides low-level controls for Minecraft, we find that MINDSTORES learns and applies its knowledge significantly better than existing memory-based LLM planners while maintaining the flexibility and generalization benefits of zero-shot approaches, representing an important step toward more capable embodied AI systems that can learn continuously through natural experience.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 31

Sculptor: Empowering LLMs with Cognitive Agency via Active Context Management

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from significant performance degradation when processing long contexts due to proactive interference, where irrelevant information in earlier parts of the context disrupts reasoning and memory recall. While most research focuses on external memory systems to augment LLMs' capabilities, we propose a complementary approach: empowering LLMs with Active Context Management (ACM) tools to actively sculpt their internal working memory. We introduce Sculptor, a framework that equips LLMs with three categories of tools: (1) context fragmentation, (2) summary, hide, and restore, and (3) intelligent search. Our approach enables LLMs to proactively manage their attention and working memory, analogous to how humans selectively focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions. Experimental evaluation on information-sparse benchmarks-PI-LLM (proactive interference) and NeedleBench Multi-Needle Reasoning-demonstrates that Sculptor significantly improves performance even without specific training, leveraging LLMs' inherent tool calling generalization capabilities. By enabling Active Context Management, Sculptor not only mitigates proactive interference but also provides a cognitive foundation for more reliable reasoning across diverse long-context tasks-highlighting that explicit context-control strategies, rather than merely larger token windows, are key to robustness at scale.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 6 2

Decoding the Enigma: Benchmarking Humans and AIs on the Many Facets of Working Memory

Working memory (WM), a fundamental cognitive process facilitating the temporary storage, integration, manipulation, and retrieval of information, plays a vital role in reasoning and decision-making tasks. Robust benchmark datasets that capture the multifaceted nature of WM are crucial for the effective development and evaluation of AI WM models. Here, we introduce a comprehensive Working Memory (WorM) benchmark dataset for this purpose. WorM comprises 10 tasks and a total of 1 million trials, assessing 4 functionalities, 3 domains, and 11 behavioral and neural characteristics of WM. We jointly trained and tested state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformers on all these tasks. We also include human behavioral benchmarks as an upper bound for comparison. Our results suggest that AI models replicate some characteristics of WM in the brain, most notably primacy and recency effects, and neural clusters and correlates specialized for different domains and functionalities of WM. In the experiments, we also reveal some limitations in existing models to approximate human behavior. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for communities in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and AI, offering a standardized framework to compare and enhance WM models, investigate WM's neural underpinnings, and develop WM models with human-like capabilities. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/ZhangLab-DeepNeuroCogLab/WorM.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10 1

FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent with Layered Memory and Character Design

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited notable efficacy in question-answering (QA) tasks across diverse domains. Their prowess in integrating extensive web knowledge has fueled interest in developing LLM-based autonomous agents. While LLMs are efficient in decoding human instructions and deriving solutions by holistically processing historical inputs, transitioning to purpose-driven agents requires a supplementary rational architecture to process multi-source information, establish reasoning chains, and prioritize critical tasks. Addressing this, we introduce FinMem, a novel LLM-based agent framework devised for financial decision-making. It encompasses three core modules: Profiling, to customize the agent's characteristics; Memory, with layered message processing, to aid the agent in assimilating hierarchical financial data; and Decision-making, to convert insights gained from memories into investment decisions. Notably, FinMem's memory module aligns closely with the cognitive structure of human traders, offering robust interpretability and real-time tuning. Its adjustable cognitive span allows for the retention of critical information beyond human perceptual limits, thereby enhancing trading outcomes. This framework enables the agent to self-evolve its professional knowledge, react agilely to new investment cues, and continuously refine trading decisions in the volatile financial environment. We first compare FinMem with various algorithmic agents on a scalable real-world financial dataset, underscoring its leading trading performance in stocks. We then fine-tuned the agent's perceptual span and character setting to achieve a significantly enhanced trading performance. Collectively, FinMem presents a cutting-edge LLM agent framework for automated trading, boosting cumulative investment returns.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 22, 2023

Understanding AI Cognition: A Neural Module for Inference Inspired by Human Memory Mechanisms

How humans and machines make sense of current inputs for relation reasoning and question-answering while putting the perceived information into context of our past memories, has been a challenging conundrum in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Inspired by human brain's memory system and cognitive architectures, we propose a PMI framework that consists of perception, memory and inference components. Notably, the memory module comprises working and long-term memory, with the latter endowed with a higher-order structure to retain more accumulated knowledge and experiences. Through a differentiable competitive write access, current perceptions update working memory, which is later merged with long-term memory via outer product associations, averting memory overflow and minimizing information conflicts. In the inference module, relevant information is retrieved from two separate memory origins and associatively integrated to attain a more comprehensive and precise interpretation of current perceptions. We exploratively apply our PMI to improve prevailing Transformers and CNN models on question-answering tasks like bAbI-20k and Sort-of-CLEVR datasets, as well as relation calculation and image classification tasks, and in each case, our PMI enhancements consistently outshine their original counterparts significantly. Visualization analyses reveal that memory consolidation, along with the interaction and integration of information from diverse memory sources, substantially contributes to the model effectiveness on inference tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2023

Cognitive Kernel: An Open-source Agent System towards Generalist Autopilots

We introduce Cognitive Kernel, an open-source agent system towards the goal of generalist autopilots. Unlike copilot systems, which primarily rely on users to provide essential state information (e.g., task descriptions) and assist users by answering questions or auto-completing contents, autopilot systems must complete tasks from start to finish independently, which requires the system to acquire the state information from the environments actively. To achieve this, an autopilot system should be capable of understanding user intents, actively gathering necessary information from various real-world sources, and making wise decisions. Cognitive Kernel adopts a model-centric design. In our implementation, the central policy model (a fine-tuned LLM) initiates interactions with the environment using a combination of atomic actions, such as opening files, clicking buttons, saving intermediate results to memory, or calling the LLM itself. This differs from the widely used environment-centric design, where a task-specific environment with predefined actions is fixed, and the policy model is limited to selecting the correct action from a given set of options. Our design facilitates seamless information flow across various sources and provides greater flexibility. We evaluate our system in three use cases: real-time information management, private information management, and long-term memory management. The results demonstrate that Cognitive Kernel achieves better or comparable performance to other closed-source systems in these scenarios. Cognitive Kernel is fully dockerized, ensuring everyone can deploy it privately and securely. We open-source the system and the backbone model to encourage further research on LLM-driven autopilot systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

AI-native Memory 2.0: Second Me

Human interaction with the external world fundamentally involves the exchange of personal memory, whether with other individuals, websites, applications, or, in the future, AI agents. A significant portion of this interaction is redundant, requiring users to repeatedly provide the same information across different contexts. Existing solutions, such as browser-stored credentials, autofill mechanisms, and unified authentication systems, have aimed to mitigate this redundancy by serving as intermediaries that store and retrieve commonly used user data. The advent of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to redefine memory management through an AI-native paradigm: SECOND ME. SECOND ME acts as an intelligent, persistent memory offload system that retains, organizes, and dynamically utilizes user-specific knowledge. By serving as an intermediary in user interactions, it can autonomously generate context-aware responses, prefill required information, and facilitate seamless communication with external systems, significantly reducing cognitive load and interaction friction. Unlike traditional memory storage solutions, SECOND ME extends beyond static data retention by leveraging LLM-based memory parameterization. This enables structured organization, contextual reasoning, and adaptive knowledge retrieval, facilitating a more systematic and intelligent approach to memory management. As AI-driven personal agents like SECOND ME become increasingly integrated into digital ecosystems, SECOND ME further represents a critical step toward augmenting human-world interaction with persistent, contextually aware, and self-optimizing memory systems. We have open-sourced the fully localizable deployment system at GitHub: https://github.com/Mindverse/Second-Me.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11 2

Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) like GPTs, trained on vast datasets, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and planning, achieving human-level performance in various tasks. Most studies focus on enhancing these models by training on ever-larger datasets to build more powerful foundation models. While training stronger models is important, enabling models to evolve during inference is equally crucial, a process we refer to as AI self-evolution. Unlike large-scale training, self-evolution may rely on limited data or interactions. Inspired by the columnar organization of the human cerebral cortex, we hypothesize that AI models could develop cognitive abilities and build internal representations through iterative interactions with their environment. To achieve this, models need long-term memory (LTM) to store and manage processed interaction data. LTM supports self-evolution by representing diverse experiences across environments and agents. In this report, we explore AI self-evolution and its potential to enhance models during inference. We examine LTM's role in lifelong learning, allowing models to evolve based on accumulated interactions. We outline the structure of LTM and the systems needed for effective data retention and representation. We also classify approaches for building personalized models with LTM data and show how these models achieve self-evolution through interaction. Using LTM, our multi-agent framework OMNE achieved first place on the GAIA benchmark, demonstrating LTM's potential for AI self-evolution. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research, emphasizing the importance of LTM for advancing AI technology and its practical applications.

  • 14 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

HEMA : A Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture for Long-Context AI Conversations

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining coherence in extended conversations spanning hundreds of turns, despite performing well within their context windows. This paper introduces HEMA (Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture), a dual-memory system inspired by human cognitive processes. HEMA combines Compact Memory - a continuously updated one-sentence summary preserving global narrative coherence, and Vector Memory - an episodic store of chunk embeddings queried via cosine similarity. When integrated with a 6B-parameter transformer, HEMA maintains coherent dialogues beyond 300 turns while keeping prompt length under 3,500 tokens. Experimental results show substantial improvements: factual recall accuracy increases from 41% to 87%, and human-rated coherence improves from 2.7 to 4.3 on a 5-point scale. With 10K indexed chunks, Vector Memory achieves P@5 >= 0.80 and R@50 >= 0.74, doubling the area under the precision-recall curve compared to summarization-only approaches. Ablation studies reveal two key insights: semantic forgetting through age-weighted pruning reduces retrieval latency by 34% with minimal recall loss, and a two-level summary hierarchy prevents cascade errors in ultra-long conversations exceeding 1,000 turns. HEMA demonstrates that combining verbatim recall with semantic continuity provides a practical solution for privacy-aware conversational AI capable of month-long dialogues without model retraining.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 23

Mazed and Confused: A Dataset of Cybersickness, Working Memory, Mental Load, Physical Load, and Attention During a Real Walking Task in VR

Virtual Reality (VR) is quickly establishing itself in various industries, including training, education, medicine, and entertainment, in which users are frequently required to carry out multiple complex cognitive and physical activities. However, the relationship between cognitive activities, physical activities, and familiar feelings of cybersickness is not well understood and thus can be unpredictable for developers. Researchers have previously provided labeled datasets for predicting cybersickness while users are stationary, but there have been few labeled datasets on cybersickness while users are physically walking. Thus, from 39 participants, we collected head orientation, head position, eye tracking, images, physiological readings from external sensors, and the self-reported cybersickness severity, physical load, and mental load in VR. Throughout the data collection, participants navigated mazes via real walking and performed tasks challenging their attention and working memory. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we conducted a case study of training classifiers in which we achieved 95% accuracy for cybersickness severity classification. The noteworthy performance of the straightforward classifiers makes this dataset ideal for future researchers to develop cybersickness detection and reduction models. To better understand the features that helped with classification, we performed SHAP(SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis, highlighting the importance of eye tracking and physiological measures for cybersickness prediction while walking. This open dataset can allow future researchers to study the connection between cybersickness and cognitive loads and develop prediction models. This dataset will empower future VR developers to design efficient and effective Virtual Environments by improving cognitive load management and minimizing cybersickness.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 10, 2024

Human-like Episodic Memory for Infinite Context LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, but still struggle with processing extensive contexts, limiting their ability to maintain coherence and accuracy over long sequences. In contrast, the human brain excels at organising and retrieving episodic experiences across vast temporal scales, spanning a lifetime. In this work, we introduce EM-LLM, a novel approach that integrates key aspects of human episodic memory and event cognition into LLMs, enabling them to effectively handle practically infinite context lengths while maintaining computational efficiency. EM-LLM organises sequences of tokens into coherent episodic events using a combination of Bayesian surprise and graph-theoretic boundary refinement in an on-line fashion. When needed, these events are retrieved through a two-stage memory process, combining similarity-based and temporally contiguous retrieval for efficient and human-like access to relevant information. Experiments on the LongBench dataset demonstrate EM-LLM's superior performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art InfLLM model with an overall relative improvement of 4.3% across various tasks, including a 33% improvement on the PassageRetrieval task. Furthermore, our analysis reveals strong correlations between EM-LLM's event segmentation and human-perceived events, suggesting a bridge between this artificial system and its biological counterpart. This work not only advances LLM capabilities in processing extended contexts but also provides a computational framework for exploring human memory mechanisms, opening new avenues for interdisciplinary research in AI and cognitive science.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 12, 2024 6

MemGen: Weaving Generative Latent Memory for Self-Evolving Agents

Agent memory shapes how Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, akin to the human brain, progressively refine themselves through environment interactions. Existing paradigms remain constrained: parametric memory forcibly adjusts model parameters, and retrieval-based memory externalizes experience into structured databases, yet neither captures the fluid interweaving of reasoning and memory that underlies human cognition. To address this gap, we propose MemGen, a dynamic generative memory framework that equips agents with a human-esque cognitive faculty. It consists of a memory trigger, which monitors the agent's reasoning state to decide explicit memory invocation, and a memory weaver, which takes the agent's current state as stimulus to construct a latent token sequence as machine-native memory to enrich its reasoning. In this way, MemGen enables agents to recall and augment latent memory throughout reasoning, producing a tightly interwoven cycle of memory and cognition. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that MemGen surpasses leading external memory systems such as ExpeL and AWM by up to 38.22%, exceeds GRPO by up to 13.44%, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization ability. More importantly, we find that without explicit supervision, MemGen spontaneously evolves distinct human-like memory faculties, including planning memory, procedural memory, and working memory, suggesting an emergent trajectory toward more naturalistic forms of machine cognition.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 29

Thinking Beyond Tokens: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Cognitive Foundations for Artificial General Intelligence and its Societal Impact

Can machines truly think, reason and act in domains like humans? This enduring question continues to shape the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Despite the growing capabilities of models such as GPT-4.5, DeepSeek, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Phi-4, and Grok 3, which exhibit multimodal fluency and partial reasoning, these systems remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on token-level prediction and lack of grounded agency. This paper offers a cross-disciplinary synthesis of AGI development, spanning artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, generative models, and agent-based systems. We analyze the architectural and cognitive foundations of general intelligence, highlighting the role of modular reasoning, persistent memory, and multi-agent coordination. In particular, we emphasize the rise of Agentic RAG frameworks that combine retrieval, planning, and dynamic tool use to enable more adaptive behavior. We discuss generalization strategies, including information compression, test-time adaptation, and training-free methods, as critical pathways toward flexible, domain-agnostic intelligence. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are reexamined not just as perception modules but as evolving interfaces for embodied understanding and collaborative task completion. We also argue that true intelligence arises not from scale alone but from the integration of memory and reasoning: an orchestration of modular, interactive, and self-improving components where compression enables adaptive behavior. Drawing on advances in neurosymbolic systems, reinforcement learning, and cognitive scaffolding, we explore how recent architectures begin to bridge the gap between statistical learning and goal-directed cognition. Finally, we identify key scientific, technical, and ethical challenges on the path to AGI.

JanusVLN: Decoupling Semantics and Spatiality with Dual Implicit Memory for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation requires an embodied agent to navigate through unseen environments, guided by natural language instructions and a continuous video stream. Recent advances in VLN have been driven by the powerful semantic understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models. However, these methods typically rely on explicit semantic memory, such as building textual cognitive maps or storing historical visual frames. This type of method suffers from spatial information loss, computational redundancy, and memory bloat, which impede efficient navigation. Inspired by the implicit scene representation in human navigation, analogous to the left brain's semantic understanding and the right brain's spatial cognition, we propose JanusVLN, a novel VLN framework featuring a dual implicit neural memory that models spatial-geometric and visual-semantic memory as separate, compact, and fixed-size neural representations. This framework first extends the MLLM to incorporate 3D prior knowledge from the spatial-geometric encoder, thereby enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of models based solely on RGB input. Then, the historical key-value caches from the spatial-geometric and visual-semantic encoders are constructed into a dual implicit memory. By retaining only the KVs of tokens in the initial and sliding window, redundant computation is avoided, enabling efficient incremental updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JanusVLN outperforms over 20 recent methods to achieve SOTA performance. For example, the success rate improves by 10.5-35.5 compared to methods using multiple data types as input and by 3.6-10.8 compared to methods using more RGB training data. This indicates that the proposed dual implicit neural memory, as a novel paradigm, explores promising new directions for future VLN research. Ours project page: https://miv-xjtu.github.io/JanusVLN.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26 1

TradingGPT: Multi-Agent System with Layered Memory and Distinct Characters for Enhanced Financial Trading Performance

Large Language Models (LLMs), prominently highlighted by the recent evolution in the Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) series, have displayed significant prowess across various domains, such as aiding in healthcare diagnostics and curating analytical business reports. The efficacy of GPTs lies in their ability to decode human instructions, achieved through comprehensively processing historical inputs as an entirety within their memory system. Yet, the memory processing of GPTs does not precisely emulate the hierarchical nature of human memory. This can result in LLMs struggling to prioritize immediate and critical tasks efficiently. To bridge this gap, we introduce an innovative LLM multi-agent framework endowed with layered memories. We assert that this framework is well-suited for stock and fund trading, where the extraction of highly relevant insights from hierarchical financial data is imperative to inform trading decisions. Within this framework, one agent organizes memory into three distinct layers, each governed by a custom decay mechanism, aligning more closely with human cognitive processes. Agents can also engage in inter-agent debate. In financial trading contexts, LLMs serve as the decision core for trading agents, leveraging their layered memory system to integrate multi-source historical actions and market insights. This equips them to navigate financial changes, formulate strategies, and debate with peer agents about investment decisions. Another standout feature of our approach is to equip agents with individualized trading traits, enhancing memory diversity and decision robustness. These sophisticated designs boost the system's responsiveness to historical trades and real-time market signals, ensuring superior automated trading accuracy.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 7, 2023

Spatially-Aware Transformer for Embodied Agents

Episodic memory plays a crucial role in various cognitive processes, such as the ability to mentally recall past events. While cognitive science emphasizes the significance of spatial context in the formation and retrieval of episodic memory, the current primary approach to implementing episodic memory in AI systems is through transformers that store temporally ordered experiences, which overlooks the spatial dimension. As a result, it is unclear how the underlying structure could be extended to incorporate the spatial axis beyond temporal order alone and thereby what benefits can be obtained. To address this, this paper explores the use of Spatially-Aware Transformer models that incorporate spatial information. These models enable the creation of place-centric episodic memory that considers both temporal and spatial dimensions. Adopting this approach, we demonstrate that memory utilization efficiency can be improved, leading to enhanced accuracy in various place-centric downstream tasks. Additionally, we propose the Adaptive Memory Allocator, a memory management method based on reinforcement learning that aims to optimize efficiency of memory utilization. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model in various environments and across multiple downstream tasks, including prediction, generation, reasoning, and reinforcement learning. The source code for our models and experiments will be available at https://github.com/junmokane/spatially-aware-transformer.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 23, 2024

It's All Connected: A Journey Through Test-Time Memorization, Attentional Bias, Retention, and Online Optimization

Designing efficient and effective architectural backbones has been in the core of research efforts to enhance the capability of foundation models. Inspired by the human cognitive phenomenon of attentional bias-the natural tendency to prioritize certain events or stimuli-we reconceptualize neural architectures, including Transformers, Titans, and modern linear recurrent neural networks as associative memory modules that learn a mapping of keys and values using an internal objective, referred to as attentional bias. Surprisingly, we observed that most existing sequence models leverage either (1) dot-product similarity, or (2) L2 regression objectives as their attentional bias. Going beyond these objectives, we present a set of alternative attentional bias configurations along with their effective approximations to stabilize their training procedure. We then reinterpret forgetting mechanisms in modern deep learning architectures as a form of retention regularization, providing a novel set of forget gates for sequence models. Building upon these insights, we present Miras, a general framework to design deep learning architectures based on four choices of: (i) associative memory architecture, (ii) attentional bias objective, (iii) retention gate, and (iv) memory learning algorithm. We present three novel sequence models-Moneta, Yaad, and Memora-that go beyond the power of existing linear RNNs while maintaining a fast parallelizable training process. Our experiments show different design choices in Miras yield models with varying strengths. For example, certain instances of Miras achieve exceptional performance in special tasks such as language modeling, commonsense reasoning, and recall intensive tasks, even outperforming Transformers and other modern linear recurrent models.

  • 4 authors
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Apr 17 4

OlaGPT: Empowering LLMs With Human-like Problem-Solving Abilities

In most current research, large language models (LLMs) are able to perform reasoning tasks by generating chains of thought through the guidance of specific prompts. However, there still exists a significant discrepancy between their capability in solving complex reasoning problems and that of humans. At present, most approaches focus on chains of thought (COT) and tool use, without considering the adoption and application of human cognitive frameworks. It is well-known that when confronting complex reasoning challenges, humans typically employ various cognitive abilities, and necessitate interaction with all aspects of tools, knowledge, and the external environment information to accomplish intricate tasks. This paper introduces a novel intelligent framework, referred to as OlaGPT. OlaGPT carefully studied a cognitive architecture framework, and propose to simulate certain aspects of human cognition. The framework involves approximating different cognitive modules, including attention, memory, reasoning, learning, and corresponding scheduling and decision-making mechanisms. Inspired by the active learning mechanism of human beings, it proposes a learning unit to record previous mistakes and expert opinions, and dynamically refer to them to strengthen their ability to solve similar problems. The paper also outlines common effective reasoning frameworks for human problem-solving and designs Chain-of-Thought (COT) templates accordingly. A comprehensive decision-making mechanism is also proposed to maximize model accuracy. The efficacy of OlaGPT has been stringently evaluated on multiple reasoning datasets, and the experimental outcomes reveal that OlaGPT surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance. Our implementation of OlaGPT is available on GitHub: https://github.com/oladata-team/OlaGPT.

  • 10 authors
·
May 23, 2023

Bridging the Vision-Brain Gap with an Uncertainty-Aware Blur Prior

Can our brain signals faithfully reflect the original visual stimuli, even including high-frequency details? Although human perceptual and cognitive capacities enable us to process and remember visual information, these abilities are constrained by several factors, such as limited attentional resources and the finite capacity of visual memory. When visual stimuli are processed by human visual system into brain signals, some information is inevitably lost, leading to a discrepancy known as the System GAP. Additionally, perceptual and cognitive dynamics, along with technical noise in signal acquisition, degrade the fidelity of brain signals relative to the visual stimuli, known as the Random GAP. When encoded brain representations are directly aligned with the corresponding pretrained image features, the System GAP and Random GAP between paired data challenge the model, requiring it to bridge these gaps. However, in the context of limited paired data, these gaps are difficult for the model to learn, leading to overfitting and poor generalization to new data. To address these GAPs, we propose a simple yet effective approach called the Uncertainty-aware Blur Prior (UBP). It estimates the uncertainty within the paired data, reflecting the mismatch between brain signals and visual stimuli. Based on this uncertainty, UBP dynamically blurs the high-frequency details of the original images, reducing the impact of the mismatch and improving alignment. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 50.9\% and a top-5 accuracy of 79.7\% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of 13.7\% and 9.8\%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/Uncertainty-aware-Blur-Prior{GitHub}.

  • 5 authors
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Mar 6

Enter the Mind Palace: Reasoning and Planning for Long-term Active Embodied Question Answering

As robots become increasingly capable of operating over extended periods -- spanning days, weeks, and even months -- they are expected to accumulate knowledge of their environments and leverage this experience to assist humans more effectively. This paper studies the problem of Long-term Active Embodied Question Answering (LA-EQA), a new task in which a robot must both recall past experiences and actively explore its environment to answer complex, temporally-grounded questions. Unlike traditional EQA settings, which typically focus either on understanding the present environment alone or on recalling a single past observation, LA-EQA challenges an agent to reason over past, present, and possible future states, deciding when to explore, when to consult its memory, and when to stop gathering observations and provide a final answer. Standard EQA approaches based on large models struggle in this setting due to limited context windows, absence of persistent memory, and an inability to combine memory recall with active exploration. To address this, we propose a structured memory system for robots, inspired by the mind palace method from cognitive science. Our method encodes episodic experiences as scene-graph-based world instances, forming a reasoning and planning algorithm that enables targeted memory retrieval and guided navigation. To balance the exploration-recall trade-off, we introduce value-of-information-based stopping criteria that determines when the agent has gathered sufficient information. We evaluate our method on real-world experiments and introduce a new benchmark that spans popular simulation environments and actual industrial sites. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding substantial gains in both answer accuracy and exploration efficiency.

  • 13 authors
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Jul 17

Astrocyte-Enabled Advancements in Spiking Neural Networks for Large Language Modeling

Within the complex neuroarchitecture of the brain, astrocytes play crucial roles in development, structure, and metabolism. These cells regulate neural activity through tripartite synapses, directly impacting cognitive processes such as learning and memory. Despite the growing recognition of astrocytes' significance, traditional Spiking Neural Network (SNN) models remain predominantly neuron-centric, overlooking the profound influence of astrocytes on neural dynamics. Inspired by these biological insights, we have developed an Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Unit (AM-SU), an innovative framework that integrates neuron-astrocyte interactions into the computational paradigm, demonstrating wide applicability across various hardware platforms. Our Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Neural Network (AstroSNN) exhibits exceptional performance in tasks involving memory retention and natural language generation, particularly in handling long-term dependencies and complex linguistic structures. The design of AstroSNN not only enhances its biological authenticity but also introduces novel computational dynamics, enabling more effective processing of complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, AstroSNN shows low latency, high throughput, and reduced memory usage in practical applications, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained environments. By successfully integrating astrocytic dynamics into intelligent neural networks, our work narrows the gap between biological plausibility and neural modeling, laying the groundwork for future biologically-inspired neural computing research that includes both neurons and astrocytes.

  • 7 authors
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Dec 12, 2023

Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

  • 47 authors
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Mar 31 7

The FinBen: An Holistic Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models

LLMs have transformed NLP and shown promise in various fields, yet their potential in finance is underexplored due to a lack of thorough evaluations and the complexity of financial tasks. This along with the rapid development of LLMs, highlights the urgent need for a systematic financial evaluation benchmark for LLMs. In this paper, we introduce FinBen, the first comprehensive open-sourced evaluation benchmark, specifically designed to thoroughly assess the capabilities of LLMs in the financial domain. FinBen encompasses 35 datasets across 23 financial tasks, organized into three spectrums of difficulty inspired by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, to evaluate LLMs' cognitive abilities in inductive reasoning, associative memory, quantitative reasoning, crystallized intelligence, and more. Our evaluation of 15 representative LLMs, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the latest Gemini, reveals insights into their strengths and limitations within the financial domain. The findings indicate that GPT-4 leads in quantification, extraction, numerical reasoning, and stock trading, while Gemini shines in generation and forecasting; however, both struggle with complex extraction and forecasting, showing a clear need for targeted enhancements. Instruction tuning boosts simple task performance but falls short in improving complex reasoning and forecasting abilities. FinBen seeks to continuously evaluate LLMs in finance, fostering AI development with regular updates of tasks and models.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
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Feb 19, 2024 5

MoM: Mixtures of Scenario-Aware Document Memories for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

The traditional RAG paradigm, which typically engages in the comprehension of relevant text chunks in response to received queries, inherently restricts both the depth of knowledge internalization and reasoning capabilities. To address this limitation, our research transforms the text processing in RAG from passive chunking to proactive understanding, defining this process as document memory extraction with the objective of simulating human cognitive processes during reading. Building upon this, we propose the Mixtures of scenario-aware document Memories (MoM) framework, engineered to efficiently handle documents from multiple domains and train small language models (SLMs) to acquire the ability to proactively explore and construct document memories. The MoM initially instructs large language models (LLMs) to simulate domain experts in generating document logical outlines, thereby directing structured chunking and core content extraction. It employs a multi-path sampling and multi-perspective evaluation mechanism, specifically designing comprehensive metrics that represent chunk clarity and extraction completeness to select the optimal document memories. Additionally, to infuse deeper human-like reading abilities during the training of SLMs, we incorporate a reverse reasoning strategy, which deduces refined expert thinking paths from high-quality outcomes. Finally, leveraging diverse forms of content generated by MoM, we develop a three-layer document memory retrieval mechanism, which is grounded in our theoretical proof from the perspective of probabilistic modeling. Extensive experimental results across three distinct domains demonstrate that the MoM framework not only resolves text chunking challenges in existing RAG systems, providing LLMs with semantically complete document memories, but also paves the way for SLMs to achieve human-centric intelligent text processing.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 15 2

CogniPair: From LLM Chatbots to Conscious AI Agents -- GNWT-Based Multi-Agent Digital Twins for Social Pairing -- Dating & Hiring Applications

Current large language model (LLM) agents lack authentic human psychological processes necessary for genuine digital twins and social AI applications. To address this limitation, we present a computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory (GNWT) that integrates human cognitive architecture principles into LLM agents, creating specialized sub-agents for emotion, memory, social norms, planning, and goal-tracking coordinated through a global workspace mechanism. However, authentic digital twins require accurate personality initialization. We therefore develop a novel adventure-based personality test that evaluates true personality through behavioral choices within interactive scenarios, bypassing self-presentation bias found in traditional assessments. Building on these innovations, our CogniPair platform enables digital twins to engage in realistic simulated dating interactions and job interviews before real encounters, providing bidirectional cultural fit assessment for both romantic compatibility and workplace matching. Validation using 551 GNWT-Agents and Columbia University Speed Dating dataset demonstrates 72% correlation with human attraction patterns, 77.8% match prediction accuracy, and 74% agreement in human validation studies. This work advances psychological authenticity in LLM agents and establishes a foundation for intelligent dating platforms and HR technology solutions.

  • 19 authors
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Jun 3

FrankenBot: Brain-Morphic Modular Orchestration for Robotic Manipulation with Vision-Language Models

Developing a general robot manipulation system capable of performing a wide range of tasks in complex, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments has long been a challenging task. It is widely recognized that achieving human-like efficiency and robustness manipulation requires the robotic brain to integrate a comprehensive set of functions, such as task planning, policy generation, anomaly monitoring and handling, and long-term memory, achieving high-efficiency operation across all functions. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), pretrained on massive multimodal data, have acquired rich world knowledge, exhibiting exceptional scene understanding and multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, existing methods typically focus on realizing only a single function or a subset of functions within the robotic brain, without integrating them into a unified cognitive architecture. Inspired by a divide-and-conquer strategy and the architecture of the human brain, we propose FrankenBot, a VLM-driven, brain-morphic robotic manipulation framework that achieves both comprehensive functionality and high operational efficiency. Our framework includes a suite of components, decoupling a part of key functions from frequent VLM calls, striking an optimal balance between functional completeness and system efficiency. Specifically, we map task planning, policy generation, memory management, and low-level interfacing to the cortex, cerebellum, temporal lobe-hippocampus complex, and brainstem, respectively, and design efficient coordination mechanisms for the modules. We conducted comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic environments, demonstrating that our method offers significant advantages in anomaly detection and handling, long-term memory, operational efficiency, and stability -- all without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 24

Transformers Meet ACT-R: Repeat-Aware and Sequential Listening Session Recommendation

Music streaming services often leverage sequential recommender systems to predict the best music to showcase to users based on past sequences of listening sessions. Nonetheless, most sequential recommendation methods ignore or insufficiently account for repetitive behaviors. This is a crucial limitation for music recommendation, as repeatedly listening to the same song over time is a common phenomenon that can even change the way users perceive this song. In this paper, we introduce PISA (Psychology-Informed Session embedding using ACT-R), a session-level sequential recommender system that overcomes this limitation. PISA employs a Transformer architecture learning embedding representations of listening sessions and users using attention mechanisms inspired by Anderson's ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational), a cognitive architecture modeling human information access and memory dynamics. This approach enables us to capture dynamic and repetitive patterns from user behaviors, allowing us to effectively predict the songs they will listen to in subsequent sessions, whether they are repeated or new ones. We demonstrate the empirical relevance of PISA using both publicly available listening data from Last.fm and proprietary data from Deezer, a global music streaming service, confirming the critical importance of repetition modeling for sequential listening session recommendation. Along with this paper, we publicly release our proprietary dataset to foster future research in this field, as well as the source code of PISA to facilitate its future use.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 29, 2024

Grounded Language Learning Fast and Slow

Recent work has shown that large text-based neural language models, trained with conventional supervised learning objectives, acquire a surprising propensity for few- and one-shot learning. Here, we show that an embodied agent situated in a simulated 3D world, and endowed with a novel dual-coding external memory, can exhibit similar one-shot word learning when trained with conventional reinforcement learning algorithms. After a single introduction to a novel object via continuous visual perception and a language prompt ("This is a dax"), the agent can re-identify the object and manipulate it as instructed ("Put the dax on the bed"). In doing so, it seamlessly integrates short-term, within-episode knowledge of the appropriate referent for the word "dax" with long-term lexical and motor knowledge acquired across episodes (i.e. "bed" and "putting"). We find that, under certain training conditions and with a particular memory writing mechanism, the agent's one-shot word-object binding generalizes to novel exemplars within the same ShapeNet category, and is effective in settings with unfamiliar numbers of objects. We further show how dual-coding memory can be exploited as a signal for intrinsic motivation, stimulating the agent to seek names for objects that may be useful for later executing instructions. Together, the results demonstrate that deep neural networks can exploit meta-learning, episodic memory and an explicitly multi-modal environment to account for 'fast-mapping', a fundamental pillar of human cognitive development and a potentially transformative capacity for agents that interact with human users.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 3, 2020

Beyond Pixels: Introducing Geometric-Semantic World Priors for Video-based Embodied Models via Spatio-temporal Alignment

Achieving human-like reasoning in deep learning models for complex tasks in unknown environments remains a critical challenge in embodied intelligence. While advanced vision-language models (VLMs) excel in static scene understanding, their limitations in spatio-temporal reasoning and adaptation to dynamic, open-set tasks like task-oriented navigation and embodied question answering (EQA) persist due to inadequate modeling of fine-grained spatio-temporal cues and physical world comprehension. To address this, we propose VEME, a novel cross-modal alignment method that enhances generalization in unseen scenes by learning an ego-centric, experience-centered world model. Our framework integrates three key components: (1) a cross-modal alignment framework bridging objects, spatial representations, and visual semantics with spatio-temporal cues to enhance VLM in-context learning; (2) a dynamic, implicit cognitive map activated by world embedding to enable task-relevant geometric-semantic memory recall; and (3) an instruction-based navigation and reasoning framework leveraging embodied priors for long-term planning and efficient exploration. By embedding geometry-aware spatio-temporal episodic experiences, our method significantly improves reasoning and planning in dynamic environments. Experimental results on VSI-Bench and VLN-CE demonstrate 1%-3% accuracy and exploration efficiency improvement compared to traditional approaches.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 29

Redefining Robot Generalization Through Interactive Intelligence

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still portrays robots as single, autonomous decision-makers, performing tasks like manipulation and navigation, with limited human involvement. However, a large class of real-world robotic systems, including wearable robotics (e.g., prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons), teleoperation, and neural interfaces, are semiautonomous, and require ongoing interactive coordination with human partners, challenging single-agent assumptions. In this position paper, we argue that robot foundation models must evolve to an interactive multi-agent perspective in order to handle the complexities of real-time human-robot co-adaptation. We propose a generalizable, neuroscience-inspired architecture encompassing four modules: (1) a multimodal sensing module informed by sensorimotor integration principles, (2) an ad-hoc teamwork model reminiscent of joint-action frameworks in cognitive science, (3) a predictive world belief model grounded in internal model theories of motor control, and (4) a memory/feedback mechanism that echoes concepts of Hebbian and reinforcement-based plasticity. Although illustrated through the lens of cyborg systems, where wearable devices and human physiology are inseparably intertwined, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to robots operating in semi-autonomous or interactive contexts. By moving beyond single-agent designs, our position emphasizes how foundation models in robotics can achieve a more robust, personalized, and anticipatory level of performance.

  • 1 authors
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Feb 9