Paper Detail

MoME: Mixture-of-Memory Embeddings for Context-Aware Sparse Lookup

Muchen Li, Leonid Sigal, Renjie Liao

huggingface Score 9.4

Published 2026-09-14 · First seen 2026-09-21

General AI

Abstract

Scaling large language models efficiently has motivated sparse capacity mechanisms such as Mixture-of-Experts and, more recently, conditional memory: token-indexed embedding tables that augment the backbone with cheap parametric lookups. Existing memory-embedding methods retrieve via a deterministic function of the surface form, which collapses different contextual senses of the same token (e.g., python the language vs. the animal) into a single fixed entry. We introduce Mixture of Memory Embeddings (MoME), a context-aware memory mechanism that replaces each token's single memory row with a mixture of M slots and uses a learned gate over the hidden state to choose which slots to read at each position. In controlled pretraining experiments across nanochat, Llama-3/MobileLLM, and Qwen3 backbones, MoME improves over Value Embedding, Bigram, and STEM baselines in iso-parameter and iso-training-FLOP settings, shows a more promising memory-size scaling trend at sub-billion scale, and remains efficient in training and inference. Qualitative routing analyses on polysemous tokens further suggest that the learned mixture exhibits a degree of semantic interpretability, dispatching the same surface token to distinct memory slots under different senses.

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BibTeX

@misc{li2026mome,
  title = {MoME: Mixture-of-Memory Embeddings for Context-Aware Sparse Lookup},
  author = {Muchen Li and Leonid Sigal and Renjie Liao},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Scaling large language models efficiently has motivated sparse capacity mechanisms such as Mixture-of-Experts and, more recently, conditional memory: token-indexed embedding tables that augment the backbone with cheap parametric lookups. Existing memory-embedding methods retrieve via a deterministic function of the surface form, which collapses different contextual senses of the same token (e.g., python the language vs. the animal) into a single fixed entry. We introduce Mixture of Memory Embedd},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.15126},
  keywords = {code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2609.15126},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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