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Oct 16

EngramEdit: Decoupled Knowledge Updates in LLMs through Conditional Memory

Conditional memory architectures such as DeepSeek Engram use input n-grams to look up learned embeddings, expanding the capacity of large language models (LLMs) with limited additional computation. Beyond model scaling, this architecture has demonstrated the potential to decouple factual knowledge storage from general-purpose computation, offering a promising route to updating factual knowledge while keeping the Transformer backbone fixed. Realizing this potential is challenging because different expressions of a fact may activate different n-gram embeddings, while updating shared embeddings can unintentionally change the model's predictions about other facts. We propose EngramEdit for decoupled knowledge updates through conditional memory. EngramEdit first computes target memory representations that make the model predict the updated fact across multiple expressions. It then jointly updates the shared n-gram embeddings to match these targets across expressions and edits, penalizing updates to frequently reused embeddings more strongly to preserve unrelated knowledge. Experiments show that EngramEdit enables independent factual knowledge updates through conditional memory, achieving near-perfect editing success. Revised knowledge is usable across unseen expressions and in multi-hop reasoning, with nearly three times the strongest baseline's accuracy under chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Unrelated knowledge and general capabilities are largely preserved even as factual updates accumulate. These findings show that EngramEdit turns conditional memory into an editable knowledge interface, extending its role beyond model scaling to support decoupled knowledge updates.

Forgetting Is Not a Fix: Path Dependence in Sequential Engram Editing

AI Engram (Kwon et al., 2026) formalizes the four engram criteria of neuroscience as a constrained inverse problem in weight space and solves it closed-form: concept-specific memory traces become linear objects that can be extracted once and combined arithmetically. Appendix F states the Compositional Memory States Hypothesis: edited models live on "a commutative manifold where the integration of A and B reaches a consistent equilibrium regardless of the learning sequence." The evidence base is single and paired edits -- in materials terms, single-cycle tests, in which fatigue accumulation is structurally invisible. Whether the hypothesis holds under sequential load is exactly the "temporal dynamics" question the paper defers to future work. We run that test on the authors' own reference implementation, at their reported best edit strength (TOFU alpha=0.6, a choice favoring the linearity hypothesis), with pre-registered predictions, across three model charges (two vendors, two architecture families). Four findings replicate across all three: (1) zero-shot composition and sequential re-calibrated editing diverge by 61-71% of the edit magnitude; (2) cut order is not interchangeable, and the effect scales with concept overlap -- in one charge the order of cutting two Paris landmarks decides whether an uninvolved third concept survives; (3) the survivors' layer-input covariances -- the method's own sufficient statistics, read as strain gauges -- drift monotonically with every further cut, in every surviving concept, in every charge; (4) erased knowledge partially returns under subsequent unrelated cuts. Appendix F's commutative-manifold hypothesis is thereby falsified for sequential editing; the single-edit results of the original paper are untouched. For unlearning-as-compliance: erasure certified today does not certify the artifact after its next edit.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 5

Tiny-Engram: Trigger-Indexed Concept Tables for Generative Vision

Current personalization methods for generative vision models typically encode new concepts through continuous adapters or weight updates, yet provide limited control over whether and when a concept should be retrieved. In this work, we introduce Tiny-Engram, a compact trigger-indexed concept table that gives visual memories an explicit lexical address and activation boundary inside frozen image and video generators. Tiny-Engram parameterizes each concept as a small set of memory entries indexed by registered n-gram matches, which modulate text-encoder hidden states only within the matched trigger region. Outside this lexical support, the conditioning pathway is identical to that of the frozen base model. Across both single-encoder latent diffusion and multi-encoder diffusion-transformer backbones, this formulation binds a rare trigger phrase to a target identity while preserving compositional control from the surrounding prompt. We further evaluate the same table-based memory in a text-conditioned video generation setting, where the trigger path reliably alters the generated subject but fine-grained identity persistence across held-out video prompts remains limited. Taken together, these results suggest that small, explicitly addressed concept tables are a practical route to modular visual personalization, with strongest evidence in image generation. For video diffusion, the remaining gap points to a broader requirement: temporally stable identity likely depends on tighter coupling between text-side memory and the evolving visual state, motivating future work on memory injection beyond the text-conditioning interface.

  • 4 authors
·
May 18