Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Weizhi Wang, Li Dong, Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Xifeng Yan, Jianfeng Gao, Furu Wei

Keywords: large language models, long-term memory, long-text modeling and understanding, residual side-network, in-context learning

TL;DR: We propose to augment Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory for memorizing long-form previous contexts and meanwhile propose a residual SideNet as the memory retriever and reader.

Abstract: Existing large language models (LLMs) can only afford fix-sized inputs due to the input length limit, preventing them from utilizing rich long-context information from past inputs. To address this, we propose a framework, Language Models Augmented with Long-Term Memory (LongMem), which enables LLMs to memorize long history. We design a novel decoupled network architecture with the original backbone LLM frozen as a memory encoder and an adaptive residual side-network as a memory retriever and reader. Such a decoupled memory design can easily cache and update long-term past contexts for memory retrieval without suffering from memory staleness. Enhanced with memory-augmented adaptation training, LongMem can thus memorize long past context and use long-term memory for language modeling. The proposed memory retrieval module can handle unlimited-length context in its memory bank to benefit various downstream tasks. Typically, LongMem can enlarge the long-form memory to 65k tokens and thus cache many-shot extra demonstration examples as long-form memory for in-context learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong long-context models on ChapterBreak, a challenging long-context modeling benchmark, and achieves remarkable improvements on memory-augmented in-context learning over LLMs. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in helping language models to memorize and utilize long-form contents.

Submission Number: 8697