Persistent Recurrent Memory Between Transformer Layers - Improves Language Model Generalization

Abstract

We introduce a simple architectural modification to decoder-only transformers: a persistent recurrent state that observes hidden representations via cross-attention, updates itself through a GRU, and modulates subsequent processing via gated addition. Inserted between the lower and upper halves of a 6-layer transformer, this module adds only 3.7\% additional parameters while reducing evaluation loss from $2.438 \pm 0.004$ to $1.743 \pm 0.018$, corresponding to a 28.5\% reduction on held-out language modeling data. The improvement is statistically significant across 5 random seeds ($p<0.01$) and corresponds to reduced overfitting (generalization gap 0.12 vs 0.26). Through controlled ablations, we demonstrate that the improvement stems entirely from the persistent memory topology, not from auxiliary self-prediction objectives. A model with identical topology but no auxiliary loss performs equivalently, while a random auxiliary loss provides no benefit. Representation probing reveals that the persistent state encodes narrative position (52\% vs 33\% chance level)---information that standard attention maintains less efficiently. Our results suggest that bridging transformer layers with a lightweight recurrent memory is a simple, effective approach to improving generalization in small-scale language models.