Frozen Memory Is Not Enough: Rethinking External Memory as Extraction
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The paper investigates how Engram-style hashed memory can be transferred between different language model backbones. By freezing a memory table trained on a source model and attaching it to a target model with only a lightweight reader, the authors find that both the memory content and correct addressing are important, but the reader must be aligned to the target to make the memory useful. In question‑answering experiments, a dual‑layer, four‑branch reader nearly matches same‑model performance, and when the reader interface is directly compatible, the frozen memory alone provides substantial benefit, with optional reader adaptation offering further gains.
The paper introduces rEDMRec, a method that compresses a large language model’s reasoning about user preferences and item comparisons into a compact, editable memory. This memory, organized into four channels—long‑term preference, short‑term context, item perception, and counterfactual hard‑negative comparisons—can be updated by an LLM controller and queried by a lightweight student LLM for ranking, eliminating the need to re‑run the expensive teacher model for each request. Experiments on ML‑1M, Amazon Beauty, and Steam datasets show that rEDMRec consistently outperforms zero‑shot, few‑shot, RAG, and GraphRAG baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% improvement in HR@1 on ML‑1M.
arXiv:2609.25853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned-memory methods store information in an explicit table and consume it through a separate reader, allowing addressing, storage, and reading to be...
arXiv:2607. 22625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but suffers from knowledge conflicts: when retrieved information contradicts parametric memory, the shared self-attention pathway produces unpredictable outputs.
The paper introduces LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a lightweight, CPU‑only, language‑model‑free scorer that learns which parts of an agent’s interaction history are task‑critical and preserves them verbatim. In experiments, LRE matches or surpasses baseline eviction policies on accuracy‑cost trade‑offs, recovers 93% of full‑history accuracy, reduces worst‑case prompt size by 52%, and outperforms dense and token‑pruning encoders in conversational memory while being 295–1569× smaller. The method also achieves superior budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading and can be trained annotation‑free, recovering 95% of supervised scorer performance.
The paper investigates a parametric approach to knowledge graph memory by compiling each entity into a LoRA adapter, enabling zero‑cost query-time retrieval via weight injection. On the MetaQA dataset, these adapters encode context‑free factual knowledge, improving exact‑match scores by up to +0.243 over a base model and achieving an oracle gap of +0.283. However, the stored knowledge is not recoverable through similarity or embedding‑based methods, indicating that knowledge is stored locally and does not transfer across semantically neighboring entities.