arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Can an AI Assistant Really Forget? Auditable Deletion from Addressable Memory

This paper introduces a deletion interface for a pretrained language model, measuring how effectively deleted records are removed from the model’s memory. By retrofitting a support‑vector memory gate into the global attention layers of a frozen Gemma 3, the authors show that deletions can be performed without altering weights and that the resulting state is close to a reference state that never stored the record. Experiments on 4B‑parameter models demonstrate low perplexity impact and strong evidence that deleted content is hard to recover, while larger or smaller models fail to achieve the same guarantees.

By Vishwajith Ramesh
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Delta N-gram: Forward-Only Continual Writing into a Language Model's Native N-gram Memory

Delta N-gram introduces a forward‑only write path into a language model’s native hashed N‑gram table, preserving the pretrained table while adding evidence through a sparse patch Δ. The method uses a 4.1 M‑parameter writer that emits gated targets per event and applies a block‑averaged delta rule to keep each row a convex combination of its old value and the new targets. Experiments on a 0.6 B prototype and Qwen3.8‑Flash‑Next show that the delta writer maintains more document‑specific memory and reduces drift compared to online gradient writes, achieving stable performance over thousands of writes. whyItMatters":"The approach allows continual updates to a language model’s memory without altering its pretrained parameters, enabling efficient, stable, and document‑specific knowledge retention during inference."

By Hao Wu