Parametric Multimodal User Memory: Storing What Captions Cannot Carry
A personalized agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who its user is. Today it is almost always text -- transcripts and captions retrieved by similarity. This serves the captionable half of a person ("my cat is named Bibi"), but discards the perceptual half no caption can hold: how a voice sounds, how a face reads across age and lighting, how tired someone sounds. We measure this loss across five modalities: a strong caption-based re-identifier recovers as little as 0.11 of a dedicated encoder's recall, collapsing toward chance on non-nameable signals. We instead ground perceptual memory in the model, decomposing recall into two subproblems: a vision-language model grounds the ...
| Authors | Bojie Li, Noah Shi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 July 2026 |
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