PolarMem: A Training-Free Polarized Latent Graph Memory for Verifiable Vision-Language Models
About
Memory is not merely a storage mechanism for intelligent systems, but a structure for organizing evidence and constraining belief. This is especially important for multimodal reasoning, where retrieved evidence must be both query-relevant and visually consistent. However, current memory systems for vision-language models (VLMs) remain largely positive-associative: they retrieve what is similar or previously observed, but lack an explicit way to remember what has been verified as absent or logically excluded. To this end, we propose \textbf{PolarMem}, a training-free polarized latent graph memory framework for verifiable vision-language reasoning. PolarMem transforms frozen VLM perceptual signals into \textit{HAS}, \textit{NOT\_HAS}, and \textit{Uncertain} memory states through semantic consistency verification and adaptive distributional partitioning, and stores them in a polarized graph with distinct positive and negative memory relations. During inference, a lexicographical logic-aware retrieval protocol enforces logical consistency before semantic similarity, suppressing conflicting memories before they enter the model context. Across eight frozen VLM backbones and six multimodal benchmarks, PolarMem consistently improves retrieval-intensive tasks and reduces retrieval-level contradictions. These results highlight negative memory as a key mechanism for building more reliable multimodal memory systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/czs-ict/PolarMem.