# RAM-Net: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Sparsely Addressable State

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11958 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11958/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06654/) (2024)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05102/) (2022)
- [Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with Delta Rule](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06464/) (2024)
- [Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06635/) (2023)
- [Linear Transformers Are Secretly Fast Weight Programmers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11174/) (2021)
- [Quest: Query-Aware Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10774/) (2024)
- [Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14052/) (2022)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [WorldAttention: An Efficient Attention Architecture for Interactive Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34606/) (2026)
- [Bridging KV-Cache Quantization and Linear Attention: From Theory to Pretrained Weight Migration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11214/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Linear attention offers an efficient alternative to full attention with a fixed-size recurrent state. However, this state is shared by all tokens, so information from distinct tokens becomes superposed within it and produces inter-token interference that degrades long-range fine-grained recall. To address this issue, we propose RAM-Net, which replaces dense access to a shared state with sparse address-based access. RAM-Net organizes the recurrent state as a fixed-size array of independent slots and uses an Address Decoder that maps each key or query into a sparse address, selecting a small subset of slots to write to or read from at each step. This design directs tokens with non-overlapping addresses to disjoint slots, suppressing inter-token interference, while keeping per-step state access dependent only on the number of selected slots rather than the total state size. Empirically, RAM-Net outperforms strong recurrent baselines on fine-grained long-range retrieval and achieves the lowest perplexity with competitive commonsense reasoning. It does so while accessing fewer state elements per step than all baselines, e.g., 8× fewer than Mamba2.