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∞-Former: Infinite Memory Transformer (arxiv.org)
3 points by edouard-harris on Sep 12, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A transformer variant stores an unlimited history in a continuous memory where nearby positions blend, so attention cost stays fixed as text grows. 'Sticky' slots keep key details sharp, and it kept information from long sequences better than transformers that must drop old text.

Abstract · $\infty$-former: Infinite Memory Transformer

Transformers are unable to model long-term memories effectively, since the amount of computation they need to perform grows with the context length. While variations of efficient transformers have been proposed, they all have a finite memory capacity and are forced to drop old information. In this paper, we propose the $\infty$-former, which extends the vanilla transformer with an unbounded long-term memory. By making use of a continuous-space attention mechanism to attend over the long-term memory, the $\infty$-former's attention complexity becomes independent of the context length, trading off memory length with precision. In order to control where precision is more important, $\infty$-former maintains "sticky memories" being able to model arbitrarily long contexts while keeping the computation budget fixed. Experiments on a synthetic sorting task, language modeling, and document grounded dialogue generation demonstrate the $\infty$-former's ability to retain information from long sequences.

Pedro Henrique Martins, Zita Marinho, André F. T. Martins
arXiv:2109.00301 · cs.CL · submitted Sep 1, 2021 · updated Mar 25, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · ACL 2022

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