xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory

tricks that made these work and now being very strong competitors to Transformers. The key here is the combination of an linear associative memory (aka Hopfield Network, aka Fast Weight Programmer, aka State Expansion...) and pushing it into a sequence with gating similar to the original LSTM (input, forget, output gate) - while here this is only dependent on the current input not the previous state for linearity. The linearity is needed to make it sequence-parallelizable, there are efforts now to add non-linearities again, but let's see. Their main benefit+downside both is that they have a fixed-size state, and therefore linear (vs Transformer-quadratic) time complexity. For larger sizes they have become popular in hybrids with Transformer (Attention) Blocks, as there are problems with long context tasks [14]. Cool thing is they can also be distilled from pre-trained Transformers with not too much performance drop [16]. 3. Along the sequence dimension most things can be categorized in these two. Attention and Linear (Associative Memory Enhanced) RNNs are heavily using Matrix Multiplications and anything else would be a waste of FLOPs on current GPUs. The essence is how to store information and how to interact with it, there might be still interesting directions as other comments show. Other important topics that go into the depth / width of the model are: Mixture of Experts, Iteration (RNNs) in Depth[17]. Disclaimer: I'm author of xLSTM and we recently released a 7B model [18] trained at NXAI, currently the fastest linear RNN at this scale and performance. Happy to answer more questions on this or the current state in this field of research. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02217 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16236 [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.11174 [4] https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV [5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08621 [6] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.00752 [7] https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06635 [8] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.19427 [9] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18668 [10] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04517 [11] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04620 [12] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06464 [13] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00663 [14] https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07887 [15] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04434 [16] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10254 [17] http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05171 [18] https://huggingface.co/NX-AI/xLSTM-7b

is not really meaningful. This is great news though, it means we are not losing anything by switching to xLSTM and we get important advantages like the scalable context window. I'm quite excited about this because we can potentially have the LLM remember what you say and do few-shot persistent learning from user interaction (updating "itself", the state vector). It would be very interesting if LLMs were no longer static. Although I'm sure it will be a challenge to train the model to keep such learnings in its memory long-term. The paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04517