English

Fast Feedforward Networks

Machine Learning 2023-09-19 v2 Artificial Intelligence Performance

Abstract

We break the linear link between the layer size and its inference cost by introducing the fast feedforward (FFF) architecture, a log-time alternative to feedforward networks. We demonstrate that FFFs are up to 220x faster than feedforward networks, up to 6x faster than mixture-of-experts networks, and exhibit better training properties than mixtures of experts thanks to noiseless conditional execution. Pushing FFFs to the limit, we show that they can use as little as 1% of layer neurons for inference in vision transformers while preserving 94.2% of predictive performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.14711,
  title  = {Fast Feedforward Networks},
  author = {Peter Belcak and Roger Wattenhofer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.14711},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

12 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:06:25.970Z