Pre-training Limited Memory Language Models with Internal and External Knowledge
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Abstract (arXiv)
Neural language models are black-boxes--both linguistic patterns and factual knowledge are distributed across billions of opaque parameters. This entangled encoding makes it difficult to reliably inspect, verify, or update specific facts. We introduce Limited Memory Language Models (LMLM), a new class of language models that externalizes factual knowledge to external database during pre-training rather than memorizing them. Our pre-training approach strategically masks externally retrieved factual values from the training loss, thereby teaching the model to perform targeted lookups rather than relying on memorization in model weights. Our experiments demonstrate that LMLMs achieve competitive performance compared to significantly larger LLMs on standard benchmarks, while offering the advantages of explicit, editable, and verifiable knowledge bases.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 56 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2025.
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56 of 69 references.
References · 56
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38 more
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 8.
12 papers.
- 2025Memory in the Age of AI Agentscited by 303
- 2025Pretraining with hierarchical memories: separating long-tail and common knowledgecited by 14
- 2025Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AIcited by 8
- 2026Cram Less to Fit More: Training Data Pruning Improves Memorization of Factscited by 3
- 2026Auditing Forgetting in Limited Memory Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Memory Decoder at Scale: A Pretrained, Parametric Long-Term Memorycited by 1
- 2025Rotation Control Unlearning: Quantifying and Controlling Continuous Unlearning for LLM with The Cognitive Rotation Spacecited by 0
- 2026LaCy: What Small Language Models Can and Should Learn is Not Just a Question of Losscited by 0
- 2026Autolearn: Learn by Surprise, Commit by Proofcited by 0
- 2026MemDefrag: Latent Memory Defragmentation for Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Co-LMLM: Continuous-Query Limited Memory Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Co-Evolving Structured Knowledge and Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Co-Evolving Structured Knowledge and Reasoning in Language Models26 Aug 2026
- 2026Memory Decoder at Scale: A Pretrained, Parametric Long-Term Memory30 Jul 2026
- 2026Co-LMLM: Continuous-Query Limited Memory Language Models8 Jul 2026
- 2026MemDefrag: Latent Memory Defragmentation for Large Language Models7 Jul 2026
- 2026Auditing Forgetting in Limited Memory Language Models1 Jul 2026
- 2026Cram Less to Fit More: Training Data Pruning Improves Memorization of Facts9 Apr 2026
- 2026Autolearn: Learn by Surprise, Commit by Proof2 Apr 2026
- 2026LaCy: What Small Language Models Can and Should Learn is Not Just a Question of Loss12 Feb 2026
- 2025Memory in the Age of AI Agents15 Dec 2025
- 2025Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI19 Oct 2025
- 2025Rotation Control Unlearning: Quantifying and Controlling Continuous Unlearning for LLM with The Cognitive Rotation Space30 Sep 2025
- 2025Pretraining with hierarchical memories: separating long-tail and common knowledge29 Sep 2025