Memory ideas

External memories, state compression, retrieval-style read/write policies and calibrated stopping rules.

Unverified 2026

Bounded Adaptive Hebbian Fast-Weight Cache

Add a recurrent associative matrix to each selected transformer layer so recent key-value relationships can be retrieved without retaining every past token or performing gradient updates. The matrix uses input-dependent retention and write gates, but retrieval is always performed from the pre-write state, preventing the current target from leaking into its own prediction. Frobenius-norm clipping makes the recurrent memory bounded and provides a direct stability control.

Useful6/10
Difficulty4/10
Novelty4/10
Paper: Where Should Experience Live? Hierarchical Hebbian Memory for Continual Vision Transformers arXiv:2609.00358
Unverified 2026

GP-DPP Adaptive Token Selection

Replace fixed-budget token or patch pruning with greedy selection that combines a teacher-derived relevance score and Gaussian-process mutual information. Select an item when it is both relevant and non-redundant, and stop when the largest remaining information gain falls below a calibrated threshold instead of retaining a fixed number of items.

Useful6/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty5/10
Paper: InfoDPP-PAC: Principled Patch Selection for Whole Slide Image Analysis arXiv:2608.23574
Unverified 2026

Near-Parseval Unitary Orbit Memory

Generate memory slots or attention keys by applying learned unitary transformations to one seed vector instead of storing every slot independently. Select transformations sequentially when they add a sufficiently new direction and reject phase-equivalent or highly coherent candidates, targeting a well-conditioned near-Parseval frame.

Useful6/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Near-Parseval orbit frames for irreducible unitary representations: from mixing and expansion arXiv:2608.15182
Unverified 2026

Token-Count-Aware Attention Projection

Use the number of tokens participating in an attention operation to adapt the projected query/key dimension according to the sharp Johnson–Lindenstrauss bound. Short attention windows receive a dimension limited by n-1, while longer windows use a logarithmic dimension, avoiding a fixed large head dimension when the current attention set contains too few points to require it.

Useful6/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty6/10
Paper: The Sharp Dimension Bound in the Johnson--Lindenstrauss Lemma arXiv:2608.13782
Unverified 2026

Residual-pivoted landmark attention

Replace uniform or random landmark selection in low-rank attention with approximate greedy pivoted QR selection on the attention matrix. At each step, select the key whose residual attention column has the largest norm, orthogonalize it against previously selected columns, and stop when the residual energy falls below a target tolerance. Use the selected columns as an adaptive attention basis and reconstruct the full attention output through a small coefficient matrix.

Useful6/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty5/10
Paper: Convergence rates for pivoted QR and LU arXiv:2607.26863
Unverified 2026

Transform-Domain Quantized Edge Attention

Compress a trained graph-attention model's edge-dependent logits or gates in the line-graph Fourier domain. Smooth edge values become concentrated in low-frequency coefficients, allowing low-frequency coefficients to retain more precision while high-frequency residuals use fewer bits or are discarded.

Useful6/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty8/10
Paper: Lossy compression of weighted graph adjacency matrices by transform coding arXiv:2607.14834
Unverified 2026

Exterior-power truncation for 2D tensor channels

Use the dimension-specific relation A_3=0 to remove all intermediate channels transforming as the third exterior power of the two-dimensional vector representation. In tensor-product attention or equivariant MLPs, this is an exact algebraic pruning rule rather than approximate low-rank compression.

Useful5/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: The Brauer category $\mathcal{B}(2)$ has principal graph $D_\infty$ arXiv:2608.18328
Unverified 2026

VC-pattern attention compression

Convert attention scores into binary incidence set systems at one or several score thresholds, then group queries that induce the same sampled-key pattern. Compute the expensive key-value aggregation once per pattern and reuse it for all queries in the group. The method is exact for the thresholded routing component and approximates dense attention when queries have a small number of stable high-weight neighborhoods.

Useful5/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Isomorphism of tournaments with bounded VC dimension arXiv:2608.14486
Unverified 2026

Sharp BLO-based adaptive spike clipping

Use the sharp exponential tail bound to set a local clipping threshold from a desired exceedance probability. Instead of globally clipping activations at a fixed value or percentile, clip each local window at its minimum plus B log(e/delta), where delta is the tolerated fraction of clipped entries.

Useful5/10
Difficulty3/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Sharp constants in the one-sided John-Nirenberg inequality for functions of bounded lower oscillation arXiv:2608.10892
Unverified 2026

Signed-triangle Nyström lookahead

Replace one-step greedy landmark selection in Nyström attention or kernel compression with a restricted pairwise-lookahead rule. The lookahead is motivated by the paper's explicit obstruction: a signed triangle can make individual column gains exhibit increasing rather than diminishing returns, so the best next column need not belong to the best pair.

Useful5/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty4/10
Paper: Nyström Error Beyond $M$-Matrices: A Minimal Diagonally Dominant Obstruction arXiv:2607.19282