arXiv AI

On the Importance of Gating: Memorization vs. In-Context Learning in State Space Models

arXiv AI
Jul 14

Extending LLM Context via Associative Recurrent Memory

arXiv:2607. 11614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) is critical for many real-world applications, yet standard transformers remain constrained by quadratic compute and linear memory scaling.

By Gleb Kuzmin, Ivan Rodkin, Aydar Bulatov, Yuri Kuratov, Lyudmila Rvanova, Mikhail Katkov, Ilia Sochenkov, Misha Tsodyks, Timothy Baldwin, Mikhail Burtsev, Artem Shelmanov
arXiv AI
Jun 4

MesaNet: Sequence Modeling by Locally Optimal Test-Time Training

arXiv:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.

By Johannes von Oswald, Nino Scherrer, Seijin Kobayashi, Luca Versari, Songlin Yang, Sarthak Mittal, Maximilian Schlegel, Kaitlin Maile, Yanick Schimpf, Oliver Sieberling, Alexander Meulemans, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie, Charlotte Frenkel, Razvan Pascanu, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Continuous Memory Machines

The paper introduces the Continuous Memory Machine (CMM), a recurrent neural network that uses separate matrix-valued short‑term and long‑term memory states. Short‑term memory tracks recent neural activity with neuron‑level models for rapid computation, while long‑term memory stores information for later use; both are jointly updated by a Transformer that allows bidirectional read‑write operations. Experiments on algorithmic, in‑context learning, and recurrent reasoning tasks show that CMM outperforms many baselines and generalizes better than previous memory‑augmented networks, while maintaining interpretable attention patterns from the Continuous Thought Machine.

By Ciaran Regan, Kai Arulkumaran, Luke Darlow, Stefania Druga, Sebastian Risi, Llion Jones
arXiv AI
Oct 12

MS-GLA: Multi-Scale Gated Linear Attention for Addressing Representational Bottlenecks via Multi-Temporal Resolution

MS-GLA introduces Multi-Scale Gated Linear Attention, distributing attention heads across multiple temporal resolutions to address representational bottlenecks in GLA Transformers. Coarser resolutions pool longer token spans for long‑range dependencies, while finer heads capture local syntax, and a learnable fusion layer recombines outputs dynamically. Experiments on language modeling, recall‑intensive tasks, and long‑context generalization show MS‑GLA outperforms GLA with up to 18.9% improvement on recall tasks and 9.5% lower perplexity on language modeling benchmarks.

By Prasoon Dev, Anirudh Sankar, Vasudeva Varma
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Persistent Recurrent Memory Between Transformer Layers - Improves Language Model Generalization

The paper proposes a lightweight recurrent memory module inserted between the lower and upper halves of a 6‑layer decoder‑only transformer. This module, which uses cross‑attention to observe hidden states, a GRU to update a persistent state, and gated addition to modulate subsequent layers, adds only 3.7% more parameters. It reduces evaluation loss by 28.5% and narrows the generalization gap, with ablations showing the benefit comes solely from the memory topology rather than auxiliary losses.

By Eduardo Novaes Hering
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Reshape and Recur: Improving SSMs with Input Reshaping and Depth Recurrence

The paper proposes two extensions to State Space Models (SSMs) to reduce memory usage and improve performance. First, it introduces depth recurrence, allowing a looped SSM with fewer parameters to match the performance of a larger, non-recurrent model. Second, it advocates using a fixed time granularity across tasks by reshaping input sequences, which enhances how information is presented to the model. Both techniques consistently benefit four representative SSM architectures (LRU, S5, LinOSS, LrcSSM).

By M\'onika Farsang, Ramin Hasani, Daniela Rus, Radu Grosu