LM2: Large Memory Models
Authors: name: Jikun Kang; name: Wenqi Wu; name: Filippos Christianos; name: Alex J. Chan; name: Fraser Greenlee; name: George Thomas; name: Marvin Purtorab; name: Andy Toulis
Published: 2025-02-09 22:11:42

Abstract: This paper introduces the Large Memory Model (LM2), a decoder-only
Transformer architecture enhanced with an auxiliary memory module that aims to
address the limitations of standard Transformers in multi-step reasoning,
relational argumentation, and synthesizing information distributed over long
contexts. The proposed LM2 incorporates a memory module that acts as a
contextual representation repository, interacting with input tokens via cross
attention and updating through gating mechanisms. To preserve the Transformers
general-purpose capabilities, LM2 maintains the original information flow while
integrating a complementary memory pathway. Experimental results on the
BABILong benchmark demonstrate that the LM2model outperforms both the
memory-augmented RMT model by 37.1% and the baseline Llama-3.2 model by 86.3%
on average across tasks. LM2 exhibits exceptional capabilities in multi-hop
inference, numerical reasoning, and large-context question-answering. On the
MMLU dataset, it achieves a 5.0% improvement over a pre-trained vanilla model,
demonstrating that its memory module does not degrade performance on general
tasks. Further, in our analysis, we explore the memory interpretability,
effectiveness of memory modules, and test-time behavior. Our findings emphasize
the importance of explicit memory in enhancing Transformer architectures.