English

Tokenizer-Agnostic Engram Module

Computation and Language 2026-07-31 v1

Abstract

Deepseek's Engram, a conditional memory module, was introduced to trade-off storage versus reasoning in large language models. However, the module relies on token-level NN-gram hashing for Engram embedding lookup, introducing a tight coupling to the tokenizer used: a model with a different tokenizer would have to train its own Engram embeddings from scratch. To improve the reusability of Engram embeddings, we propose a change to the hashing routine, enabling compatibility between Engram models using different tokenizers. Instead of modelling disjoint NN-gram spaces, we treat NN-gram as a method to sample potentially useful byte sequences, from all possible byte sequences across tokens. We replace the XOR-based hashing with the general polynomial hashing with a joint embedding space across NN. This work investigates the possible trade-offs and shows that this simple substitution produces comparable performance and achieves tokenizer-agnosticism: hash equivalence for byte-equivalent token sequences.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.29065,
  title  = {Tokenizer-Agnostic Engram Module},
  author = {Jia Peng Lim and Hai Leong Chieu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.29065},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Preprint, 7 pages