Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Learning in real-world multiagent tasks is challenging due to the usual partial observability ofeach agent. Previous efforts alleviate thepartial observability by historical hidden states with Recurrent Neural Networks, however, they do not consider themultiagent characters thateither themultiagent observationconsists ofanumber ofobject entities orthe action space shows clear entity interactions.

Onemightconsider"2V 7 V"and "V 84V"tobedifferent patterns orinvariants butatahigher levelofabstraction theycan both represent the concept of a repeated symbol irrespective of the position of the repeating item.

One important problem is the large memory consumption required by the BPTT.

Introducing variability while maintaining coherence is a core task in learning to generate utterances in conversation.

Here we propose that it is fruitful to consider memory interactions along with storage and retrieval.

Modern language models are powerful, but typically static after deployment. A major obstacle to building models that continually learn over time is catastrophic forgetting, where updating on new data erases previously acquired capabilities. Motivated by the intuition that mitigating forgetting is challenging because trainable parameters are shared across all tasks, we investigate whether sparse parameter updates can enable learning without catastrophic forgetting. We introduce sparse memory finetuning, leveraging memory layer models (Berges et al., 2024), which are sparsely updated by design. By updating only the memory slots that are highly activated by a new piece of knowledge relative to usage on pretraining data, we reduce interference between new knowledge and the model's existing capabilities. We evaluate learning and forgetting compared to full finetuning and parameter-efficient finetuning with LoRA on two question answering tasks. We find that sparse memory finetuning learns new knowledge while exhibiting substantially less forgetting: while NaturalQuestions F1 drops by 89% after full finetuning on new facts and 71% with LoRA, sparse memory finetuning yields only an 11% drop with the same level of new knowledge acquisition. Our results suggest sparsity in memory layers offers a promising path toward continual learning in large language models.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Stack-augmented recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been of interest to the deep learning community for some time. However, the difficulty of training memory models remains a problem obstructing the widespread use of such models. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Memory architecture. Inspired by Ordered Neurons (Shen et al., 2018), we introduce a new attention-based mechanism and use its cumulative probability to control the writing and erasing operation of memory. We also introduce a new Gated Recursive Cell to compose lower level representations into higher level representation. We demonstrate that our model achieves strong performance on the logical inference task (Bowman et al., 2015) and the ListOps (Nangia and Bowman, 2018) task. We can also interpret the model to retrieve the induced tree structure, and find that these induced structures align with the ground truth. Finally, we evaluate our model on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank tasks (Socher et al., 2013), and find that it performs comparatively with the state-of-the-art methods in the literature