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Memorizing Transformers

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arxiv 2203.08913 v1 pith:4RAZ23BF submitted 2022-03-16 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

Memorizing Transformers

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL
keywords languagemodelsbenchmarkscodeimprovesincludingknowledgememorize
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Language models typically need to be trained or finetuned in order to acquire new knowledge, which involves updating their weights. We instead envision language models that can simply read and memorize new data at inference time, thus acquiring new knowledge immediately. In this work, we extend language models with the ability to memorize the internal representations of past inputs. We demonstrate that an approximate kNN lookup into a non-differentiable memory of recent (key, value) pairs improves language modeling across various benchmarks and tasks, including generic webtext (C4), math papers (arXiv), books (PG-19), code (Github), as well as formal theorems (Isabelle). We show that the performance steadily improves when we increase the size of memory up to 262K tokens. On benchmarks including code and mathematics, we find that the model is capable of making use of newly defined functions and theorems during test time.

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Cited by 32 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

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  2. ECHO: Continuous Hierarchical Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

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  3. Memory Inception: Latent-Space KV Cache Manipulation for Steering LLMs

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  4. Exact Flow Linear Attention: Exact Solution from Continuous-Time Dynamics

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  5. LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory

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  6. Leave No Context Behind: Efficient Infinite Context Transformers with Infini-attention

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  7. MemSFT: Mitigating Alignment Tax with an External Parametric Memory

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  9. What to Keep, What to Forget: A Rate--Distortion View of Memory Compaction in LLMs and Agents

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  11. A Hippocampus for Linear Attention: An Exact Memory for What the Recurrent State Forgets

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  13. Memory-Managed Long-Context Attention: Bounded Editable Memory with a Hard Lifecycle and Calibrated Sparse Fallback

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  17. Memory Inception: Latent-Space KV Cache Manipulation for Steering LLMs

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Memory Inception is a training-free method that injects latent KV banks at chosen layers to steer LLMs, achieving superior control-drift balance and up to 118x storage reduction on personality and structured-reasoning tasks.

  18. The Impossibility Triangle of Long-Context Modeling

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  19. InfoFlow KV: Information-Flow-Aware KV Recomputation for Long Context

    cs.LG 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

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  20. Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture

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  22. MoBA: Mixture of Block Attention for Long-Context LLMs

    cs.LG 2025-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MoBA routes attention over blocks via MoE-style gating to enable dynamic, bias-light long-context attention that matches full attention performance at lower cost.

  23. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2022-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Emergent abilities are capabilities present in large language models but absent in smaller ones and cannot be predicted by extrapolating smaller model performance.

  24. Memoir: Should a Model Write to Its Memory While It Thinks?

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Writing to fast memory during pondering slows associative-recall learning at a fixed budget, but does not reduce final performance once training is long enough.

  25. Extending LLM Context via Associative Recurrent Memory

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  26. Memory-Managed Long-Context Attention: Bounded Editable Memory with a Hard Lifecycle and Calibrated Sparse Fallback

    cs.CL 2026-06 conditional novelty 5.0

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  27. Latent Recurrent Transformer: Architecture Exploration, Training Strategies, and Scaling Behavior

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

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  29. NGM: A Plug-and-Play Training-Free Memory Module for LLMs

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  30. InfoFlow KV: Information-Flow-Aware KV Recomputation for Long Context

    cs.LG 2026-03 conditional novelty 5.0

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  31. From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMs

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