Hi, I'm Ben Hoover
I'm an AI Researcher studying memory
Understanding AI foundation models from the perspective of large Associative Memories.
I am a Machine Learning PhD candidate at Georgia Tech advised by Polo Chau. I successfully defended my PhD thesis on 6 July 2026. My research focuses on building more interpretable and parameter efficient AI by rethinking the way we train and build deep models, taking inspiration from Associative Memories and Hopfield Networks. I like to visualize what happens inside AI models.
News
July 2026
🥳 Defended my thesis titled "Memory as Computation: Associative Memory as a Foundation for Modern AI"! Watch recording on YouTube 🎥.
June 2026
🎉 Awarded an NVIDIA Academic Grant Program gift valued at $57k.
May 2026
🏅 Recognized as a Gold Reviewer (top 25%) for ICML 2026.
Jan 2026
🥳 Our paper "NRGPT" is accepted to ICLR 2026. See you in Rio, and swing by our associative memory workshop while you're there! 🥳
Nov 2025
Our next iteration of the "New Frontiers in Associative Memory" workshop is accepted to ICLR 2026. See you in Rio! 🥳
Nov 2025
🏅 I received a Top Reviewer award at NeurIPS 2025 (top 8% of 24k+ reviewers).
See more...
PhD Thesis · 2026
Memory as Computation: Associative Memory as a Foundation for Modern AIResearch Highlights
NRGPT
A minimal modification of GPT unifies it with the energy-based model framework, where inference becomes an exploration of tokens on an energy landscape.
Epanechnikov DenseAM
Dense Associative Memories can produce emergent memories when we replace the Gaussian kernel with a KDE-optimal Epanechnikov kernel.
Tutorial on Associative Memory
Energy-based Associative Memory transformed the field of AI, but it is hardly understood. We present a birds eye view of Associative Memory, beginning with the invention of the Hopfield Network and concluding with modern, dense storage versions that have strong connections to Transformers and kernel methods.
ConceptAttention
We discover how to extract highly salient features from the learned representations of Diffusion Transformers, using our technique to segment images by semantic concept. We name our technique ConceptAttention, which outperforms all prior methods on single- and multi-class classification.
DenseAMs meet Random Features
DenseAMs can store an exponential number of memories, but each memory adds new parameters to the energy function. We propose a novel, "Distributed representation for DenseAMs" (DrDAM) that allows us to add new memories without increasing the total number of parameters.
Transformer Explainer
Transformers are the most powerful AI innovation of the last decade. Learn how they work by interacting with every mechanic from the comfort of your web browser. Taught in Georgia Tech CSE6242 Data and Visual Analytics (typically 250-300 students per semester).
Energy Transformer
We derive an Associative Memory inspired by the famous Transformer architecture, where the forward pass through the model is memory retrieval by energy descent.