# Survey on Memory-Augmented Neural Networks: Cognitive Insights to AI Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00083/) (2023)
- [Neural Turing Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.5401/) (2014)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09210/) (2023)
- [REVEAL: Retrieval-Augmented Visual-Language Pre-Training with Multi-Source Multimodal Knowledge Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05221/) (2022)
- [Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09260/) (2022)
- [Retrieval Augmented Classification for Long-Tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11233/) (2022)
- [Retrieval Augmented Visual Question Answering with Outside Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03809/) (2022)
- [One Question Answering Model for Many Languages with Cross-lingual Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11976/) (2021)
- [Improving Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation by Controlling Source and Fuzzy-Match Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05047/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16153/) (2025)
- [Human-inspired Perspectives: A Survey on AI Long-term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00489/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Long-Term Memory for Long-Context Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23730/) (2025)
- [UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12279/) (2026)
- [Securing Agentic AI: Threat Modeling and Risk Analysis for Network Monitoring Agentic AI System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10043/) (2025)
- [Prospector Heads: Generalized Feature Attribution for Large Models & Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11729/) (2024)
- [EvoMail: Self-Evolving Cognitive Agents for Adaptive Spam and Phishing Email Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21129/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (MANNs), delving into how they blend human-like memory processes into AI. It covers different memory types, like sensory, short-term, and long-term memory, linking psychological theories with AI applications. The study investigates advanced architectures such as Hopfield Networks, Neural Turing Machines, Correlation Matrix Memories, Memformer, and Neural Attention Memory, explaining how they work and where they excel. It dives into real-world uses of MANNs across Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Multimodal Learning, and Retrieval Models, showing how memory boosters enhance accuracy, efficiency, and reliability in AI tasks. Overall, this survey provides a comprehensive view of MANNs, offering insights for future research in memory-based AI systems.