Authors
Affiliations

Dmitry Krotov

IBM Research, MIT

Benjamin Hoover

IBM Research, Georgia Tech

Parikshit Ram

IBM Research

Bao Pham

IBM Research, RPI

Associative Memory Tutorial

A complete introduction to Associative Memories and Hopfield Networks

This website serves as a living companion to the tutorial manuscript and to the tutorial presentation at ICML 2025. It dreams of being a one-stop shop for learning all things about Associative Memory. It’s still working towards that.

The tutorial has happened! Checkout the presentation recordings at the ICML website.

You can also download the slides from each of the speakers below:

Getting Started

Playing with the codebase

Website structure

Notebook demos

The website is a (growing) collection of notebook demos on Associative Memory. Each notebook is primarily a blog post on this site, but it is also fully runnable on colab and as a raw .ipynb file using the uv environment setup below.

See the overview in tutorials for a bit more detail.

To add new examples, edit the source tutorial notebooks (as either .ipynb or plain text .qmd files) saved in nbs/tutorial/.

Slow first run

The first time you run the notebooks will be slow. We cache some of the long-running code after the first time, but the cache will not persist across Colab sessions.

Utitity library

pip install amtutorial

We aim for simplicity and clarity in the notebooks. Thus, we migrate some helper functions (particularly around loading and processing data, see nbs/lib/01_data_utils.qmd) to a pypi package called amtutorial to avoid cluttering the notebooks. An added benefit of this is that all dependencies needed to run these notebooks can be installed using pip install amtutorial.

How this website is built

The website is built using an in-house fork of nbdev that develops everything in this tutorial from source .ipynb or .qmd files saved in nbs/. The website, pypi package, and package documentation all come for free with nbdev. The in-house fork enables working with plain text .qmd files instead of .ipynb files. With the right extensions and hotkeys, .qmd files are pleasant to develop inside VSCode and interop seamlessly with both git and AI tooling.

Installation

I just want to run the notebooks locally

pip install amtutorial

## Install torch to run the `diffusion as memory` notebook. CPU or CUDA versions work
# pip install torch --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu

## OPTIONAL: For rendering videos in notebooks, use ffmpeg. Can use conda to install as
#conda install conda-forge::ffmpeg conda-forge::openh264

Then open up the .ipynb notebooks in tutorial_ipynbs/ in your favorite notebook editor, using the same env where you installed amtutorial.

I want to develop the website

Pre-requisites

  • Install uv using curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
  • Install quarto
  • We use conda (or better yet, mamba) for managing the ffmpeg dependency, which only matters if ffmpeg is not already installed on your system.

Setting up the environment

From the root of the repo:

uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate

# Expose venv to ipython
uv run ipython kernel install --user --env VIRTUAL_ENV $(pwd)/.venv --name=amtutorial 

## Install torch to run the `diffusion as memory` notebook. CPU or CUDA versions work
# pip install torch --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu

# OPTIONAL: For rendering videos in notebooks
conda install conda-forge::ffmpeg conda-forge::openh264

Development pipelines

View a local version of the website with:

uv run nbdev_preview

Pushes to main deploy the website. The site will be live after a few minutes on github.

git checkout main

# Update the website. Takes a moment even with cached training runs
make deploy && git add . && git commit -m "Update site" && git push

Make a minor-patch update to the pypi package (preferably, only if amtutorials/src was updated):

make pypi && uv run nbdev_pypi

Useful scripts (for reference only)

uv run nbdev_preview                         # Preview website locally
bash scripts/prep_website_deploy.sh          # Sync dependencies, export qmd notebooks to ipynb for colab, and build website
bash scripts/export_qmd_as_ipynb.sh          # Export qmd notebooks to ipynb for colab
uv run python scripts/sync_dependencies.py   # Sync nbdev and pyproject.toml dependencies
uv run python scripts/prep_pypi.py           # Bump patch version and sync dependencies
uv run nbdev_pypi                            # Push to pypi