What if Transformers had memory along the depth axis? This paper recasts residual connections as a regression problem.
Title: Depth Memory
URL:
It unifies residuals, Attention Residuals and Hyper-Connections as Read/Write operations on memory streams, and proposes LDM (Linear Depth Memory), a fixed-size memory that stores information across layers.
Three highlights:
🧮 An exact regression over depth
Each layer's output is treated as a key-value observation, and a weighted least-squares problem with forgetting factors is solved with recursive least squares (RLS). The outer-product update of linear attention turns out to be just an approximation.
⚡ GPU implementation that makes it practical
State unwinding recovers earlier states from a small saved context, and windowed writes batch updates. With CuTe kernels on B200, it beats Full AttnRes in throughput and is on par with Block AttnRes.
📈 Consistent gains at 400M and 1.5B
At 1.5B, LAMBADA perplexity drops from 10.49 (PreLN) to 8.42 (LDM) with only about 1% extra parameters, and gains keep growing with depth.
Removing the residual stream hurts a lot, a reminder of how much the additive path matters.
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Transformer# #
LLM#