Neural Attention Memory

Abstract

We propose a novel perspective of the attention mechanism by reinventing it as a memory architecture for neural networks, namely Neural Attention Memory (NAM). NAM is a memory structure that is both readable and writable via differentiable linear algebra operations. We explore three use cases of NAM: memory-augmented neural network (MANN), few-shot learning, and efficient long-range attention. First, we design two NAM-based MANNs of Long Short-term Memory (LSAM) and NAM Turing Machine (NAM-TM) that show better computational powers in algorithmic zero-shot generalization tasks compared to other baselines such as differentiable neural computer (DNC). Next, we apply NAM to the N-way K-shot learning task and show that it is more effective at reducing false positives compared to the baseline cosine classifier. Finally, we implement an efficient Transformer with NAM and evaluate it with long-range arena tasks to show that NAM can be an efficient and effective alternative for scaled dot-product attention.