In plain words: Facts live in an outside database, and training skips grading the model on those values, so it learns to look them up instead of memorizing them. The result matches much larger models while keeping facts easy to check and edit.
Abstract · Pre-training Limited Memory Language Models with Internal and External Knowledge
Neural language models are black-boxes--both linguistic patterns and factual knowledge are distributed across billions of opaque parameters. This entangled encoding makes it difficult to reliably inspect, verify, or update specific facts. We introduce Limited Memory Language Models (LMLM), a new class of language models that externalizes factual knowledge to external database during pre-training rather than memorizing them. Our pre-training approach strategically masks externally retrieved factual values from the training loss, thereby teaching the model to perform targeted lookups rather than relying on memorization in model weights. Our experiments demonstrate that LMLMs achieve competitive performance compared to significantly larger LLMs on standard benchmarks, while offering the advantages of explicit, editable, and verifiable knowledge bases.
Linxi Zhao, Sofian Zalouk, Christian K. Belardi, Justin Lovelace, Jin Peng Zhou, Ryan Thomas Noonan, Dongyoung Go, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Yoav Artzi, Jennifer J. Sun
arXiv:2505.15962 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted May 21, 2025 · updated Oct 2, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Code, models, and data available at https://github.com/kilian-group/LMLM