Heterogenous Memory Augmented Neural Networks
Zihan Qiu Zhen Liu Shuicheng Yan Shanghang Zhang Jie Fu
It has been shown that semi-parametric methods, which combine standard neural
networks with non-parametric components such as external memory modules and
data retrieval, are particularly helpful in data scarcity and
out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. However, existing semi-parametric methods
mostly depend on independent raw data points - this strategy is difficult to
scale up due to both high computational costs and the incapacity of current
attention mechanisms with a large number of tokens. In this paper, we introduce
a novel heterogeneous memory augmentation approach for neural networks which,
by introducing learnable memory tokens with attention mechanism, can
effectively boost performance without huge computational overhead. Our
general-purpose method can be seamlessly combined with various backbones (MLP,
CNN, GNN, and Transformer) in a plug-and-play manner. We extensively evaluate
our approach on various image and graph-based tasks under both in-distribution
(ID) and OOD conditions and show its competitive performance against
task-specific state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at
\url{https://github.com/qiuzh20/HMA}.