TL;DR: Cortex bakes the gains an LLM gets from context into its weights, so they persist after the context is removed. After 50 sequential factual edits it recovers 88.9% of the gain while keeping 99.8% of original performance.
Title: Cortex: Consolidating Context into Parametric Memory
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Key points
ใป๐ง Inspired by hippocampus-to-neocortex consolidation; unifies knowledge editing, skill learning, behavior steering, and suppression as one problem
ใป๐ฎ The model generates queries anticipating how the context will be used and learns from them
ใป๐งฉ Updates only the FFN: low-rank updates (Synaptic) or new added channels (Structural), both mergeable into the weights
ใป๐ฉโ๐ซ A frozen teacher that sees the context distills its outputs and hidden states into a student that doesn't
ใป๐ Tested on 4B-120B dense and MoE models; batch editing hits 80-91% CR vs. 36-46% for the strongest baselines
ใป๐ค On ALFWorld, the consolidated model even beats supplying the context directly
ใปโ ๏ธ Knowledge suppression still harms neighboring knowledge
๐ก A practical path beyond RAG and prompting: folding experience into the weights.
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LLM# #
ContinualLearning#