ViLoMem: Agentic Learner with Grow-and-Refine Multimodal Semantic Memory

Abstract

MLLMs exhibit strong reasoning on isolated queries, yet they operate de novo--solving each problem independently and often repeating the same mistakes. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly store past trajectories for reuse. However, trajectory-based memory suffers from brevity bias, gradually losing essential domain knowledge. More critically, even in truly multimodal problem-solving settings, it records only a **single-modality** trace of past behavior, failing to preserve how visual attention and logical reasoning jointly contributed to the solution. This is fundamentally misaligned with human cognition: semantic memory is both **multimodal and integrated**, preserving visual and abstract knowledge through coordinated but distinct representational streams. We thus introduce **ViLoMem**, a dual-stream memory framework that constructs compact, schema-based memory. It separately encodes visual distraction patterns and logical reasoning errors, enabling MLLMs to learn from their successful and failed experiences. Following a grow-and-refine principle, the system incrementally accumulates and updates multimodal semantic knowledge--preserving stable, generalizable strategies while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Across nine multimodal benchmarks, **ViLoMem** consistently improves pass@1 accuracy and substantially reduces repeated visual and logical errors. Ablations confirm the necessity of dual-stream memory with explicit distraction-hallucination separation, demonstrating the value of error-aware multimodal memory for lifelong and cross-domain agentic learning.