Not All Memories are Created Equal: Learning to Forget by Expiring
Attention mechanisms have shown promising results in sequence modeling tasks that require long-term memory. Recent work investigated mechanisms to reduce the computational cost of preserving and storing memories. However, not all content in the past is equally important to remember. We propose Expire-Span, a method that learns to retain the most important information and expire the irrelevant information. This forgetting of memories enables Transformers to scale to attend over tens of thousands of previous timesteps efficiently, as not all states from previous timesteps are preserved. We demonstrate that Expire-Span can help models identify and retain critical information and show it can achieve strong performance on reinforcement learning tasks specifically designed to challenge this functionality. Next, we show that Expire-Span can scale to memories that are tens of thousands in size, setting a new state of the art on incredibly long context tasks such as character-level language modeling and a frame-by-frame moving objects task. Finally, we analyze the efficiency of Expire-Span compared to existing approaches and demonstrate that it trains faster and uses less memory.
Code (1)
Tasks
AllLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Not All Memories are Created Equal: Learning to Expire
Attention mechanisms have shown promising results in sequence modeling tasks that require long-term memory. Recent work has investigated mechanisms to reduce the computational cost of preserving and storing the memories.…
AllLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingShort-Term Memory Through Persistent Activity: Evolution of Self-Stopping and Self-Sustaining Activity in Spiking Neural Networks
Memories in the brain are separated in two categories: short-term and long-term memories. Long-term memories remain for a lifetime, while short-term ones exist from a few milliseconds to a few minutes. Within short-term …
Memorisation and forgetting in a learning Hopfield neural network: bifurcation mechanisms, attractors and basins
Despite explosive expansion of artificial intelligence based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), these are employed as "black boxes'', as it is unclear how, during learning, they form memories or develop unwanted featu…
PBFT-Backed Semantic Voting for Multi-Agent Memory Pruning
The proliferation of multi-agent systems (MAS) in complex, dynamic environments necessitates robust and efficient mechanisms for managing shared knowledge. A critical challenge is ensuring that distributed memories remai…
Forgetting leads to chaos in attractor networks
Attractor networks are an influential theory for memory storage in brain systems. This theory has recently been challenged by the observation of strong temporal variability in neuronal recordings during memory tasks. In …
Retrieval