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arXiv · 2002.03519

Self-Attentive Associative Memory

Hung Le·Truyen Tran·Svetha Venkatesh
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Abstract

Heretofore, neural networks with external memory are restricted to single memory with lossy representations of memory interactions. A rich representation of relationships between memory pieces urges a high-order and segregated relational memory. In this paper, we propose to separate the storage of individual experiences (item memory) and their occurring relationships (relational memory). The idea is implemented through a novel Self-attentive Associative Memory (SAM) operator. Found upon outer product, SAM forms a set of associative memories that represent the hypothetical high-order relationships between arbitrary pairs of memory elements, through which a relational memory is constructed from an item memory. The two memories are wired into a single sequential model capable of both memorization and relational reasoning. We achieve competitive results with our proposed two-memory model in a diversity of machine learning tasks, from challenging synthetic problems to practical testbeds such as geometry, graph, reinforcement learning, and question answering.

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Hung Le, Truyen Tran, Svetha Venkatesh. 2020-02-10. Self-Attentive Associative Memory. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03519

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