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Related papers: Modifying Memories in Transformer Models

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Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

Access to external knowledge is essential for many natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and dialogue. Existing methods often rely on a parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters, or use a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Yuxiang Wu , Yu Zhao , Baotian Hu , Pasquale Minervini , Pontus Stenetorp , Sebastian Riedel

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Eric Zhang , Leshem Chosen , Jacob Andreas

Despite the recent observation that large language models (LLMs) can store substantial factual knowledge, there is a limited understanding of the mechanisms of how they acquire factual knowledge through pretraining. This work addresses this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Hoyeon Chang , Jinho Park , Seonghyeon Ye , Sohee Yang , Youngkyung Seo , Du-Seong Chang , Minjoon Seo

We study the problem of incorporating prior knowledge into a deep Transformer-based model,i.e.,Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to enhance its performance on semantic textual matching tasks. By probing and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Tingyu Xia , Yue Wang , Yuan Tian , Yi Chang

Large language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to perform factual recall. Prior work has found that transformers trained on factual recall tasks can store information at a rate proportional to their parameter count. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee , Alberto Bietti

When training data is scarce, the incorporation of additional prior knowledge can assist the learning process. While it is common to initialize neural networks with weights that have been pre-trained on other large data sets, pre-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Laura von Rueden , Sebastian Houben , Kostadin Cvejoski , Christian Bauckhage , Nico Piatkowski

Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Abishek Thamma , Micha Heilbron

Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Helia Hashemi , Hamed Zamani , W. Bruce Croft

Large pretrained self-attention neural networks, or transformers, have been very successful in various tasks recently. The performance of a model on a given task depends on its ability to memorize and generalize the training data. Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Aki Härmä , Marcin Pietrasik , Anna Wilbik

Foundation models encompass an extensive knowledge base and offer remarkable transferability. However, this knowledge becomes outdated or insufficient over time. The challenge lies in continuously updating foundation models to accommodate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Wenxuan Zhang , Paul Janson , Rahaf Aljundi , Mohamed Elhoseiny

Large transformer-based pre-trained language models have achieved impressive performance on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks and can capture factual knowledge in their parameters. We argue that storing large amounts of knowledge in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Jivat Neet Kaur , Sumit Bhatia , Milan Aggarwal , Rachit Bansal , Balaji Krishnamurthy

Conversational AI systems that rely on Large Language Models, like Transformers, have difficulty interweaving external data (like facts) with the language they generate. Vanilla Transformer architectures are not designed for answering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Stephan Raaijmakers , Roos Bakker , Anita Cremers , Roy de Kleijn , Tom Kouwenhoven , Tessa Verhoef

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress from pre-training on and memorizing a wide range of textual data, however, this process might suffer from privacy issues and violations of data protection regulations. As a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Jiaao Chen , Diyi Yang

Transformer encoder-decoder models have achieved great performance in dialogue generation tasks, however, their inability to process long dialogue history often leads to truncation of the context To address this problem, we propose a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Qingyang Wu , Zhou Yu

Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases have become a necessary step to unlock various capabilities, enabling LLMs to follow natural language instructions or align with human preferences. However, it carries the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Tingfeng Hui , Zhenyu Zhang , Shuohuan Wang , Weiran Xu , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Large Language Models have received significant attention due to their abilities to solve a wide range of complex tasks. However these models memorize a significant proportion of their training data, posing a serious threat when disclosed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Aymen Shabou , Sonia Vanier

Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to integrate new knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ya Gao , Kalle Kujanpää , Pekka Marttinen , Harri Valpola , Alexander Ilin

How do transformer language models memorize factual associations? A common view casts internal weight matrices as associative memories over pairs of embeddings, requiring parameter counts that scale linearly with the number of facts. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Shauli Ravfogel , Gilad Yehudai , Joan Bruna , Alberto Bietti

Previous works show that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can capture factual knowledge. However, some analyses reveal that PLMs fail to perform it robustly, e.g., being sensitive to the changes of prompts when extracting factual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Shaobo Li , Xiaoguang Li , Lifeng Shang , Chengjie Sun , Bingquan Liu , Zhenzhou Ji , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu