NEW paper worth reading.
(bookmark it)
The basic idea is to pair a compressive recurrent state with a small exact memory, which helps to recover long-range recall without giving up the efficiency of linear attention.
More on it below:
Linear-attention and state-space models compress the whole prefix into a fixed-size state. That buys O(1) memory, but when many key-value associations compete, earlier facts get overwritten and needle recall degrades.
HOLA gives linear attention a hippocampal complement. It keeps the usual delta-rule state as compressive memory and adds a bounded exact KV cache, forming a semiparametric test-time memory.
The state models linearly compressible structure while the cache stores associations that should not be forced through it. The cache writes without a learned eviction module, keeping only tokens whose prediction residual was actually committed to the state.
At 340M parameters on 15B SlimPajama tokens, HOLA lowers Wikitext perplexity from 27.32 to 22.92, below a full-attention Transformer++ at 26.88, and stays robust on RULER needle recall out to 32k tokens, 16x its training length.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02303
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