@Phoenixyin13: If the full score is 10, I would honestly give this MIT paper's SMT idea and writing an 8. The paper proposes Supervised Memory Training, using Transformer as a super teacher to first distill in parallel the most important things to remember at each moment…

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supervised-memory-training rnn transformer parallel-training long-range-dependencies mit

Summary

This paper proposes Supervised Memory Training (SMT), which uses Transformer as a super teacher to distill memory states in parallel, then trains RNN with one-step supervised learning, achieving fully parallel training and reducing gradient path from O(T) to O(1), significantly improving long-range dependency learning.

If the full score is 10, I would honestly give this MIT paper's SMT idea and writing an 8. The paper proposes the idea of Supervised Memory Training: using Transformer as a super teacher, first distill in parallel the memory states that should be remembered at each moment, then teach the RNN with just one step of supervised learning. The result is fully parallel training, with the gradient path shortened from O(T) to O(1), and long-range dependencies are learned much better. Before, when training RNNs, I felt it was like teaching someone to memorize an entire long novel from start to finish page by page, and making a mistake early on would affect later parts. With SMT, the Transformer first distills the key memory points of the whole book, then teaches the RNN only what to remember at page t and how to update memory when turning to page t+1. Each step can be taught simultaneously, so learning is faster and better. It makes RNNs efficient to train and scale again, making them extremely suitable for scenarios that require fixed memory and sequential processing with inference, such as agents, phones, robots, or real-time AI. The most mechanistic and worth-reading parts of the paper, in my opinion, are Fig 9's compression-as-scaling-axis and Fig 14's memory geometry. We may once again have recurrent models that are both expressive and efficient, no longer forced to rely entirely on Transformer's KV cache eating up VRAM. I don't know if this will bring RNNs back to life, but the idea of this paper feels quite interesting.
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If the score is out of 10, I would genuinely give this MIT paper an 8 for both the SMT idea and the writing.

The paper proposes Supervised Memory Training: using a Transformer as a super teacher to first distill, in parallel, the memory states that should be remembered at each timestep, then teaching the RNN with just a single step of supervised learning. The result is fully parallel training, with the gradient path shortened from O(T) to O(1), leading to significantly better learning of long-range dependencies.

Previously, training an RNN felt like teaching someone to memorize an entire long novel page by page from beginning to end — if you made a mistake earlier, it would affect later parts.

With this SMT approach, the Transformer first extracts the key memory points from the whole book, then only teaches the RNN what should be remembered from page t, and how to update memory when moving to page t+1. Every step can be taught simultaneously, making learning both fast and effective.

It makes RNNs efficiently trainable and scalable again, ideal for scenarios that require fixed memory budgets and sequential processing with inference, such as agents, phones, robots, or real-time AI.

The most mechanistic and worth-reading parts, in my opinion, are Fig 9 (compression-as-scaling-axis) and Fig 14 (memory geometry).

We might once again have recurrent models that are both expressive and efficient, without being forced to rely solely on Transformers’ KV cache eating up GPU memory.

I’m not sure if this will revive RNNs, but the idea of this paper feels quite interesting.

Grigory Sapunov (@che_shr_cat):
1/ We have been training RNNs wrong for decades.

Backpropagation through time (BPTT) forces sequential updates, creating unstable O(T) gradient paths.

What if we could train highly expressive, non-linear RNNs with flat, parallelized O(1) gradients?

It is now possible. 🧵

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