ATLAS: Learning to Optimally Memorize the Context at Test Time
Authors: name: Ali Behrouz; name: Zeman Li; name: Praneeth Kacham; name: Majid Daliri; name: Yuan Deng; name: Peilin Zhong; name: Meisam Razaviyayn; name: Vahab Mirrokni
Published: 2025-05-29 17:57:16

Abstract: Transformers have been established as the most popular backbones in sequence
modeling, mainly due to their effectiveness in in-context retrieval tasks and
the ability to learn at scale. Their quadratic memory and time complexity,
however, bound their applicability in longer sequences and so has motivated
researchers to explore effective alternative architectures such as modern
recurrent neural networks (a.k.a long-term recurrent memory module). Despite
their recent success in diverse downstream tasks, they struggle in tasks that
requires long context understanding and extrapolation to longer sequences. We
observe that these shortcomings come from three disjoint aspects in their
design: (1) limited memory capacity that is bounded by the architecture of
memory and feature mapping of the input; (2) online nature of update, i.e.,
optimizing the memory only with respect to the last input; and (3) less
expressive management of their fixed-size memory. To enhance all these three
aspects, we present ATLAS, a long-term memory module with high capacity that
learns to memorize the context by optimizing the memory based on the current
and past tokens, overcoming the online nature of long-term memory models.
Building on this insight, we present a new family of Transformer-like
architectures, called DeepTransformers, that are strict generalizations of the
original Transformer architecture. Our experimental results on language
modeling, common-sense reasoning, recall-intensive, and long-context
understanding tasks show that ATLAS surpasses the performance of Transformers
and recent linear recurrent models. ATLAS further improves the long context
performance of Titans, achieving +80\% accuracy in 10M context length of
BABILong benchmark.