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Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memory (called hidden state), attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Ali Behrouz , Peilin Zhong , Vahab Mirrokni

We unveil that internal representations in large language models (LLMs) serve as reliable proxies of learned knowledge, and propose RECALL, a novel representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bowen Wang , Haiyuan Wan , Liwen Shi , Chen Yang , Peng He , Yue Ma , Haochen Han , Wenhao Li , Tiao Tan , Yongjian Li , Fangming Liu , Yifan Gong , Sheng Zhang

Memory is fundamental to intelligence, enabling learning, reasoning, and adaptability across biological and artificial systems. While Transformer architectures excel at sequence modeling, they face critical limitations in long-range context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Parsa Omidi , Xingshuai Huang , Axel Laborieux , Bahareh Nikpour , Tianyu Shi , Armaghan Eshaghi

Reasoning in large language models is often discussed as a single capability, but some of its gains may stem from simpler underlying operations. We examine two such primitives, recall and state-tracking, through five controlled task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Shivam Rawat , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai , Nicholas Kluge Corrêa

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

Sequence models lie at the heart of modern deep learning. However, rapid advancements have produced a diversity of seemingly unrelated architectures, such as Transformers and recurrent alternatives. In this paper, we introduce a unifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Ke Alexander Wang , Jiaxin Shi , Emily B. Fox

A longstanding challenge for the Machine Learning community is the one of developing models that are capable of processing and learning from very long sequences of data. The outstanding results of Transformers-based networks (e.g., Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Matteo Tiezzi , Michele Casoni , Alessandro Betti , Tommaso Guidi , Marco Gori , Stefano Melacci

The most important architectural problem in AI is not the size of the model but the absence of a layer that carries forward what the model has come to understand. Sessions end. Context windows fill. Memory APIs return flat facts that the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Samuel Sameer Tanguturi

The organization of latent knowledge within large-scale models poses unique challenges when addressing overlapping representations and optimizing contextual accuracy. Conceptual redundancies embedded across layers often result in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joseph Sakau , Evander Kozlowski , Roderick Thistledown , Basil Steinberger

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Simran Arora , Sabri Eyuboglu , Michael Zhang , Aman Timalsina , Silas Alberti , Dylan Zinsley , James Zou , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

Language models are increasingly capable, yet still fail at a seemingly simple task of multi-digit multiplication. In this work, we study why, by reverse-engineering a model that successfully learns multiplication via \emph{implicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiaoyan Bai , Itamar Pres , Yuntian Deng , Chenhao Tan , Stuart Shieber , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg , Andrew Lee

Recent advancements in recurrent architectures, such as Mamba and RWKV, have showcased strong language capabilities. Unlike transformer-based models, these architectures encode all contextual information into a fixed-size state, leading to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yingfa Chen , Xinrong Zhang , Shengding Hu , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have benefited enormously from scaling, yet these gains are bounded by five fundamental limitations: (1) hallucination, (2) context compression, (3) reasoning degradation, (4) retrieval fragility, and (5)…

Biological and machine pattern recognition systems face a common challenge: Given sensory data about an unknown object, classify the object by comparing the sensory data with a library of internal representations stored in memory. In many…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-13 M. Brandon Westover , Joseph A. O'Sullivan

Transformers have been established as the most popular backbones in sequence modeling, mainly due to their effectiveness in in-context retrieval tasks and the ability to learn at scale. Their quadratic memory and time complexity, however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Ali Behrouz , Zeman Li , Praneeth Kacham , Majid Daliri , Yuan Deng , Peilin Zhong , Meisam Razaviyayn , Vahab Mirrokni

Transformers have been established as the de-facto backbones for most recent advances in sequence modeling, mainly due to their growing memory capacity that scales with the context length. While plausible for retrieval tasks, it causes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ali Behrouz , Zeman Li , Yuan Deng , Peilin Zhong , Meisam Razaviyayn , Vahab Mirrokni

When large language models encounter conflicting information in context, which memories survive -- early or recent? We adapt classical interference paradigms from cognitive psychology to answer this question, testing 39 LLMs across diverse…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Sourav Chattaraj , Kanak Raj

Hybrid sequence models that combine efficient Transformer components with linear sequence modeling blocks are a promising alternative to pure Transformers, but most are still pretrained from scratch and therefore fail to reuse existing…

Given the recent success of Deep Learning applied to a variety of single tasks, it is natural to consider more human-realistic settings. Perhaps the most difficult of these settings is that of continual lifelong learning, where the model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-21 Matthew Riemer , Tim Klinger , Djallel Bouneffouf , Michele Franceschini

Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent CoT) models promise efficient reasoning via continuous representations, yet exhibit puzzling performance inconsistencies: excelling at exploration (ProsQA: 97.0%) but failing at computation (GSM8K: 34.1%). We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiaxuan Zou , Yaozhong Xiong , Yong Liu