[HN Gopher] EM-LLM: Human-Inspired Episodic Memory for Infinite ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       EM-LLM: Human-Inspired Episodic Memory for Infinite Context LLMs
        
       Author : jbotz
       Score  : 104 points
       Date   : 2025-05-10 07:49 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | MacsHeadroom wrote:
       | So, infinite context length by making it compute bound instead of
       | memory bound. Curious how much longer this takes to run and when
       | it makes sense to use vs RAG.
        
       | mountainriver wrote:
       | TTT, cannon layers, and titans seem like a stronger approach IMO.
       | 
       | Information needs to be compressed into latent space or it
       | becomes computationally intractable
        
         | searchguy wrote:
         | do you have references to
         | 
         | > TTT, cannon layers, and titans
        
           | najarvg wrote:
           | This was the nearest reference I could find. Links to an
           | unofficial pytorch implementation on Github are also linked
           | in the threads somewhere - https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaM
           | A/comments/1i0q8nw/titans_...
        
         | vessenes wrote:
         | is titans replicated? I feel like lucidrains couldn't
         | replicate.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | I think something like Titans explains Gemini's excellent
           | long context performance. That would explain why the Titan
           | team hasn't released the training code or hyperpameters used
           | even though they said in the paper that they would, and why
           | soon after that it came out that DeepMind would be holding
           | off publishing new results for 6 months to avoid giving away
           | competitive advantages.
        
       | p_v_doom wrote:
       | Interesting. Before there even was attention I was thinking that
       | the episodic memory model offers something that could be very
       | useful for neural nets, so its cool to see people testing that
        
       | killerstorm wrote:
       | Note that this works within a single sequence of tokens. It might
       | be consistent with "episodic memory" metaphor if we consider a
       | particular transformer run as its experience.
       | 
       | But this might be very different from what people expect from
       | "memory" - i.e. ability to learn vast amounts of information and
       | retrieve it as necessary.
       | 
       | This is more like a refinement of transformer attention: instead
       | of running attention over all tokens (which is very expensive as
       | it's quadratic), it selects a subset of token spans and runs
       | fine-grained attention only on those. So it essentially breaks
       | transformer attention into two parts - coarse-grained (k-NN over
       | token spans) and fine-grained (normal).
       | 
       | It might be a great thing for long-context situations. But it
       | doesn't make sense when you want millions of different facts to
       | be considered - making them into long context is rather
       | inefficient.
        
         | yorwba wrote:
         | It would be inefficient if you had to do it from scratch for
         | every query, but if you can do it once as a preprocessing step
         | and reuse the prepared context for many queries, it might start
         | to become more efficient than a shorter context that includes
         | only some documents but has to be reprocessed because it's
         | different every time.
        
           | killerstorm wrote:
           | Yes, I think it might be a good solution where you have a
           | context up to 10M of tokens and you do a lot of requests with
           | that context. It might be relevant for agentic stuff which
           | tends to produce long chat logs - especially with some
           | gadgets on top, e.g. some 'episodes' might be completely
           | removed as obsolete.
           | 
           | But I don't think it's a good solution for bigger amounts of
           | data - as in that case it's more beneficial if that can be
           | formed into independent memories.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-05-14 23:02 UTC)