Hugging Face Daily PapersMuchen Li, Leonid Sigal, Renjie Liao1 min readpaperadvanced
MoME: Mixture-of-Memory Embeddings for Context-Aware Sparse Lookup
Summary
The paper proposes Mixture of Memory Embeddings (MoME), a context‑aware sparse lookup that replaces each token’s single memory row with a gated mixture of multiple slots. Experiments on Llama‑3, MobileLLM and Qwen3 show MoME outperforms existing memory‑embedding baselines at equal parameter and FLOP budgets and exhibits interpretable routing for polysemous tokens.
- MoME uses a learned gate over the hidden state to select among M memory slots per token, enabling context‑dependent retrieval.
- In iso‑parameter and iso‑FLOP pretraining experiments, MoME beats Value Embedding, Bigram, and STEM baselines on nanochat, Llama‑3/MobileLLM, and Qwen3 backbones.
- Scaling results indicate MoME’s performance improves with larger memory sizes at sub‑billion model scales while remaining efficient.
- Routing analysis shows distinct memory slots are activated for different senses of the same token, suggesting semantic interpretability.
LLM engineers seeking efficient, context‑sensitive capacity extensions should care because MoME adds semantic memory without extra compute overhead.
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