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Memory Decoder: A Pretrained, Plug-and-Play Memory for Large Language Models

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Paper Summary

Paperzilla title
Memory Decoder: A Plug-and-Play Brain Boost for Language Models

This paper introduces Memory Decoder, a plug-and-play memory module that enhances domain adaptation for LLMs. It outperforms existing methods in efficiency and adaptability by mimicking the behavior of non-parametric retrievers during a pre-training phase, allowing a compact integration for inference without model updates or retrieval overhead. The single limitation is the pre-training computational cost, amortized across all models and domains.

Explain Like I'm Five

This paper introduces a new memory module called "Memory Decoder" that helps large language models learn domain-specific knowledge, like medical or financial terms, without retraining the whole model, making them faster and more efficient.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

None identified

Identified Limitations

Computational overhead during pre-training
The pre-training phase involves searching through datasets, which is computationally expensive.
Not fully zero-shot cross-architecture transfer
While cross-tokenizer adaptation requires less training than from-scratch methods, some updates are still needed to align embeddings.

Rating Explanation

The paper presents a novel and promising approach to domain adaptation for large language models. The proposed Memory Decoder offers a plug-and-play solution that improves performance without modifying the original model's parameters, addresses limitations of existing methods like DAPT and RAG, and shows strong empirical results. The limitations acknowledged are relatively minor compared to the potential impact of the approach.

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File Information

Original Title: Memory Decoder: A Pretrained, Plug-and-Play Memory for Large Language Models
Uploaded: August 23, 2025 at 09:56 AM
Privacy: Public