Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling
Lingrui Mei, Shenghua Liu Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yiwei Wang University of California, Merced, Yuyao Ge, Baolong Bi, Jiayu Yao, Jun Wan UBS Group AG, Ziling Yin 等 10 位作者
Long contexts break transformers: attention scores dilute across thousands of tokens, critical information gets lost in the middle, and the model cannot adapt to novel patterns at inference time. Recent work on test-time adaptation addresses this by maintaining a form of working memory—transient parameters updated on the current context—but existing approaches employ uniform write policies that waste computation on low-value regions and suffer from high gradient variance across semantically heterogeneous contexts. In this work, we reframe test-time adaptation as a budget-constrained memory consolidation problem, asking: given limited computational budget, which parts of the context should be consolidated into working memory? We propose GDWM (\textbf{G}ated \textbf{D}ifferentiable \textbf{W}orking \textbf{M}emory), a framework that introduces a Write Controller to gate the memory consolidation process. Our controller estimates Contextual Utility—an information-theoretic measure quantifying how much each region depends on long-range context—and allocates gradient steps accordingly, subject to a coverage constraint that ensures global representation. Theoretically, we prove that our chunk-restricted sampling strategy reduces gradient variance by eliminating inter-chunk variance via the Law of Total Variance. Experiments on ZeroSCROLLS and LongBench v2 benchmarks demonstrate that GDWM achieves comparable or superior performance with 4 ×fewer gradient steps compared to uniform baselines—excelling on sparse-information tasks (+6–13% on Qasper, +5–13% on GovReport for smaller models) while revealing principled trade-offs on dense-coverage tasks, establishing a new efficiency-performance Pareto frontier for test-time adaptation.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表