Visual content memorability has intrigued the scientific community for decades, with applications spanning from understanding nuanced aspects of human memory to enhancing content design. A significant challenge in progressing the field lies in the high cost of collecting memorability annotations from humans, which constrains both the diversity and scalability of available datasets. Existing datasets typically provide only aggregate memorability scores for visual content, overlooking the nuanced signals embedded in natural, open-ended recall descriptions. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale, unsupervised dataset designed explicitly for modeling visual memorability signals, containing over 82,000 videos paired with descriptive recall data. We leverage tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) retrieval queries from online platforms such as Reddit. We demonstrate that this unsupervised dataset provides rich signals for two memorability-related tasks: recall generation and ToT retrieval. Large vision-language models fine-tuned on our dataset outperform state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o in generating open-ended memorability descriptions for visual content. In addition, we employ a contrastive training strategy to create the first model capable of multimodal ToT retrieval. Our dataset and models present a new research direction and provide scalable tools for advancing work on visual content memorability.1

Communication is defined as "*Who* says *what* to *whom* with *what* effect." A message from a communicator generates downstream receiver effects, also known as behavior. Receiver behavior, being a downstream effect of the message, carries rich signals about it. Even after carrying signals about the message, the behavior signal is often ignored while training vision-language models. We show that training VLMs on receiver behavior can actually help improve their content-understanding abilities. We demonstrate that training VLMs to predict receiver behaviors, such as likes, comments, and replay graphs, which are available at scale, enhances the VLM's performance across a broad range of downstream content understanding tasks. We show this performance increase over 6 types of behavior, 46 different tasks covering image, video, text, and audio over 26 benchmark datasets across both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, outperforming many supervised baselines on diverse tasks ranging from emotion recognition to captioning by up to 150%. We note that since receiver behavior, such as likes, comments, and replay graphs, is collected by default on the internet and does not need any human annotations to be useful, the performance improvement we get after training on this data is essentially free lunch. We also release **BLIFT**, our **Behaviour-LLaVA IFT** dataset comprising 730k images and videos with their receiver behavior collected from multiple platforms on which we train our models to achieve this. The dataset and code are available at [behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/behavior-llava](https://behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/behavior-llava).

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in workflows involving generating content to be consumed by humans (*e.g.,* marketing) and also in directly interacting with humans (*e.g.,* through chatbots). The development of such systems that are capable of generating verifiably persuasive messages presents both opportunities and challenges for society. On the one hand, such systems could positively impact domains like advertising and social good, such as addressing drug addiction, and on the other, they could be misused for spreading misinformation and shaping political opinions. To channel LLMs' impact on society, we need to develop systems to measure and benchmark their persuasiveness. With this motivation, we introduce **PersuasionBench** and **PersuasionArena**, the first large-scale benchmark and arena containing a battery of tasks to automatically measure the simulative and generative persuasion abilities of large language models. We introduce **transsuasion** (trans = carrying across, suasion = the act of persuading), a novel task of transforming non-persuasive language into persuasive content while preserving other factors determining persuasiveness (sender, receiver, time, and channel). Our findings indicate that the simulative persuasion capabilities of LLMs are barely above random; however, their generative persuasion capabilities are much better. For instance, GPT-4o loses only 36% of the time when playing against the best human persuader. Further, we find that LLMs' persuasiveness correlates positively with model size, but smaller models can also be made to have a higher persuasiveness than much larger models. Notably, targeted training using synthetic and natural datasets significantly enhances smaller models' persuasive capabilities, challenging scale-dependent assumptions. Our findings carry key implications for both model developers and policymakers. For instance, while the EU AI Act and California's SB-1047 aim to regulate AI models based on the number of floating point operations, we demonstrate that simple metrics like this alone fail to capture the full scope of AI's societal impact. We invite the community to explore and contribute to PersuasionArena and PersuasionBench, available at [behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/measure-persuasion](https://behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/measure-persuasion), to advance our understanding of AI-driven persuasion and its societal implications.

Despite the importance of long-term memory in marketing and brand building, until now, there has been no large-scale study on the memorability of ads. All previous memorability studies have been conducted on short-term recall on specific content types like action videos. On the other hand, long-term memorability is crucial for advertising industry, and ads are almost always highly multimodal. Therefore, we release the first memorability dataset, LAMBDA, consisting of 1749 participants and 2205 ads covering 276 brands. Running statistical tests over different participant subpopulations and ad types, we find many interesting insights into what makes an ad memorable, e.g., fast-moving ads are more memorable than those with slower scenes; people who use ad-blockers remember a lower number of ads than those who don't. Next, we present a model, Henry, to predict the memorability of a content. Henry achieves state-of-the-art performance across all prominent literature memorability datasets. It shows strong generalization performance with better results in 0-shot on unseen datasets. Finally, with the intent of memorable ad generation, we present a scalable method to build a high-quality memorable ad generation model by leveraging automatically annotated data. Our approach, SEED (Self rEwarding mEmorability Modeling), starts with a language model trained on LAMBDA as seed data and progressively trains an LLM to generate more memorable ads. We show that the generated advertisements have 44% higher memorability scores than the original ads. We release this large-scale ad dataset, UltraLAMBDA, consisting of 5 million ads. Our code and the datasets, LAMBDA and UltraLAMBDA, are open-sourced at https://behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/memorability.