publications
2026
- Co-LMLM: Continuous-Query Limited Memory Language ModelsPreprint (Under Review), 2026
Limited memory language models (LMLMs) externalize factual knowledge during pretraining to a knowledge base (KB), rather than memorizing it in their weights. During generation, the model then fetches knowledge from the KB as needed. This recently introduced paradigm provides multiple advantages, including knowledge control capabilities that remain beyond conventional LLMs. We propose continuous-query LMLM (CO-LMLM), where the KB pairs continuous keys with textual knowledge values, a significant departure from prior reliance on relational KB and queries. CO-LMLM generates flexible vector queries at minimal cost, while still integrating human-readable and attributable retrieved knowledge into its generation. We pair this design with an annotation pipeline that tags free-form factual spans in arbitrary text, removing prior work’s restriction to Wikipedia. Across pretraining on Wikipedia and FineWeb-Edu and at multiple model scales, CO-LMLM outperforms prior LMLMs and vanilla LLMs in both perplexity and factual precision. At 360M scale, this includes lower perplexity than models pretrained on 40x more data, and SimpleQA-verified performance that is in line with gpt-4o-mini and higher than Claude Sonnet 4.5.
@article{feldman2026colmlmcontinuousquerylimitedmemory, title = {Co-LMLM: Continuous-Query Limited Memory Language Models}, author = {Feldman, Yair and Zhao, Linxi and Godey, Nathan and Go, Dongyoung and Hua, Yilun and Weinberger, Kilian Q. and Sun, Jennifer J. and Artzi, Yoav}, year = {2026}, journal = {Preprint (Under Review)}, }
2025
- No Mean Feat: Simple, Strong Baselines for Context CompressionYair Feldman and Yoav ArtziPreprint, 2025
Context compression reduces Transformer inference costs by replacing lengthy inputs with shorter pre-computed representations. It carries significant benefits for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and has attracted growing research attention. However, progress remains difficult to measure due to inconsistent evaluations and baselines. We design a standard, easy-to-reproduce evaluation suite for context compression, BenchPress, along with simple, high-performance baselines for English reading comprehension. BenchPress supports benchmarking across model scales, datasets, compression ratios, and short (<1K tokens) to mid-range (<8K tokens) contexts. While the suite is applicable to any compression paradigm, our baselines target soft context compression. We establish two simple baselines that strongly outperform the widely used causal compression-token approach: mean pooling and a bidirectional compression-token variant. Our results show the benefit of bidirectional attention when computing compressed representations, and that simple pooling is an expressive compression operator.
@article{feldman2025simplecontextcompressionmeanpooling, title = {No Mean Feat: Simple, Strong Baselines for Context Compression}, author = {Feldman, Yair and Artzi, Yoav}, year = {2025}, journal = {Preprint}, } - Breadcrumbs Reasoning: Memory-Efficient Reasoning with Compression BeaconsIn Workshop on Efficient Reasoning @ NeurIPS, 2025
The scalability of large language models for long-context reasoning is severely constrained by the linear growth of their Transformer key-value cache, which incurs significant memory and computational costs. We posit that as a model generates reasoning tokens, the informational value of past generated tokens diminishes, creating an opportunity for compression. In this work, we propose to periodically compress the generation KV cache with a learned, special-purpose token and evict compressed entries. We train the model to perform this compression via a modified joint distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our training method minimizes overhead over the conventional RL process, as it leverages RL outputs for distillation. Empirically, our method achieves a superior memory-accuracy Pareto frontier compared to both the model without cache compression and training-free compression techniques.
@inproceedings{monea2025breadcrumbsreasoningmemoryefficientreasoning, title = {Breadcrumbs Reasoning: Memory-Efficient Reasoning with Compression Beacons}, author = {Monea, Giovanni and Feldman, Yair and Padmanabhan, Shankar and Brantley, Kianté and Artzi, Yoav}, year = {2025}, booktitle = {Workshop on Efficient Reasoning @ NeurIPS}, }
2019
- Multi-Hop Paragraph Retrieval for Open-Domain Question AnsweringYair Feldman and Ran El-YanivIn ACL, 2019
This paper is concerned with the task of multi-hop open-domain Question Answering (QA). This task is particularly challenging since it requires the simultaneous performance of textual reasoning and efficient searching. We present a method for retrieving multiple supporting paragraphs, nested amidst a large knowledge base, which contain the necessary evidence to answer a given question. Our method iteratively retrieves supporting paragraphs by forming a joint vector representation of both a question and a paragraph. The retrieval is performed by considering contextualized sentence-level representations of the paragraphs in the knowledge source. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance over two well-known datasets, SQuAD-Open and HotpotQA, which serve as our single- and multi-hop open-domain QA benchmarks, respectively.
@inproceedings{feldman-el-yaniv-2019-multi, title = {Multi-Hop Paragraph Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering}, author = {Feldman, Yair and El-Yaniv, Ran}, booktitle = {ACL}, year = {2019}, }