Online Adaptation of Language Models with a Memory of Amortized Contexts
Due to the rapid generation and dissemination of information, large language models (LLMs) quickly run out of date despite enormous development costs. To address the crucial need to keep models updated, online learning has emerged as a critical tool when utilizing LLMs for real-world applications. However, given the ever-expanding corpus of unseen documents and the large parameter space of modern LLMs, efficient adaptation is essential. To address these challenges, we propose Memory of Amortized Contexts (MAC), an efficient and effective online adaptation framework for LLMs with strong knowledge retention. We propose a feature extraction and memory-augmentation approach to compress and extract information from new documents into compact modulations stored in a memory bank. When answering questions, our model attends to and extracts relevant knowledge from this memory bank. To learn informative modulations in an efficient manner, we utilize amortization-based meta-learning, which substitutes an otherwise required optimization process with a single forward pass of the encoder. Subsequently, we learn to choose from and aggregate selected documents into a single modulation by conditioning on the question, allowing us to adapt a frozen language model during test time without requiring further gradient updates. Our experiment demonstrates the superiority of MAC in multiple aspects, including online adaptation performance, time, and memory efficiency. In addition, we show how MAC can be combined with and improve the performance of popular alternatives such as retrieval augmented generations (RAGs). Code is available at: https://github.com/jihoontack/MAC.
Code (1)
Tasks
Language ModellingMeta-LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Latent Context Compilation: Distilling Long Context into Compact Portable Memory
Efficient long-context LLM deployment is stalled by a dichotomy between amortized compression, which struggles with out-of-distribution generalization, and Test-Time Training, which incurs prohibitive synthetic data cost…
Memory-Computation Tradeoffs in Semi Amortized Parametric Optimization
Learning-enabled decision systems often use offline data or computation to reduce online compute cost. Despite the empirical success of such approaches, there is limited general understanding of how much offline informat…
Can Large Language Models Keep Up? Benchmarking Online Adaptation to Continual Knowledge Streams
LLMs operating in dynamic real-world contexts often encounter knowledge that evolves continuously or emerges incrementally. To remain accurate and effective, models must adapt to newly arriving information on the fly. We…
The Retriever Should Remember: Experience-Amortized Reranking for Long-Term Agent Memory
Long-term language-model agents accumulate memories across interactions, but their retrievers typically do not accumulate retrieval experience. Semantic retrieval is efficient, but embedding similarity does not always re…
Semantic RetrievalAgentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
Large language model (LLM) applications such as agents and domain-specific reasoning increasingly rely on context adaptation: modifying inputs with instructions, strategies, or evidence, rather than weight updates. Prior…