The location of this General Exam is Friend Center 202, not CS 202.

Shmuel Berman will present his General Exam "Beyond Long Context: Measuring Memory, Compression, and Calibration" on Friday, January 30, 2026 at 9:15 AM in FC 202 and via zoom.

Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/8227846962?omn=97734303297

Committee Members: Jia Deng (advisor), Zhuang Liu, Tom Griffiths

Abstract:

Humans reliably accumulate knowledge from experience over long time spans, but today’s LLMs and VLMs still struggle when the relevant evidence is distributed across long streams. Furthermore, even though humans frequently forget information, they are very cognizant of what they forget. We frame episodic memory as an online compression problem and investigate the memory capacity and compressive abilities of pretrained models and common architectures.. Our evaluation provides valuable information on how to improve the long-term memory of autonomous agents.

Reading List:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jsRPipttEXSFjk-tLyfAYpuZlztDuGEbaspba-xn2V8/edit?usp=sharing

Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.