Papers › Learning to Remember More with Less Memorization

Learning to Remember More with Less Memorization

5 Jan 2019ICLR 2019 5arXiv:1901.01347archive 2025-07-28

Hung Le, Truyen Tran, Svetha Venkatesh

Memory-augmented neural networks consisting of a neural controller and an external memory have shown potentials in long-term sequential learning. Current RAM-like memory models maintain memory accessing every timesteps, thus they do not effectively leverage the short-term memory held in the controller. We hypothesize that this scheme of writing is suboptimal in memory utilization and introduces redundant computation. To validate our hypothesis, we derive a theoretical bound on the amount of information stored in a RAM-like system and formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the bound. The proposed solution dubbed Uniform Writing is proved to be optimal under the assumption of equal timestep contributions. To relax this assumption, we introduce modifications to the original solution, resulting in a solution termed Cached Uniform Writing. This method aims to balance between maximizing memorization and forgetting via overwriting mechanisms. Through an extensive set of experiments, we empirically demonstrate the advantages of our solutions over other recurrent architectures, claiming the state-of-the-arts in various sequential modeling tasks.

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Syntology Ran 3 of 3 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it.

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3 samples harvested; 3 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
1ran · our draft was wrong
1ran · fixture could not drive it

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exact_acc thaihungle/UW-DNC/synthetic_task.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 3786f12279ce538c · report
load thaihungle/UW-DNC/synthetic_task.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · c03957231341007b · report
onehot thaihungle/UW-DNC/synthetic_task.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · b0584c5b4ca70059 · report

Tasks

MemorizationSentiment AnalysisSequential Image ClassificationText Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sentiment Analysis Yelp Binary classification DNC+CUW Error 3.60 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis Yelp Fine-grained classification DNC+CUW Error 34.40 #12 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Sequential Image Classification Sequential MNIST DNC+CUW Permuted Accuracy 96.3% #20 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Sequential Image Classification Sequential MNIST DNC+CUW Unpermuted Accuracy 99.1% #20 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification AG News DNC+CUW Error 6.10 #6 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification Yahoo! Answers DNC+CUW Accuracy 74.30 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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