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Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N^2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have…
Broad textual understanding and in-context learning require language models that utilize full document contexts. Due to the implementation challenges associated with directly training long-context models, many methods have been proposed for…
It is well known that LLMs cannot generalize well to long contexts whose lengths are larger than the training sequence length. This poses challenges when employing LLMs for processing long input sequences during inference. In this work, we…
The ability to process long contexts is crucial for many natural language processing tasks, yet it remains a significant challenge. While substantial progress has been made in enhancing the efficiency of attention mechanisms, there is still…
Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…
Learned self-attention functions in state-of-the-art NLP models often correlate with human attention. We investigate whether self-attention in large-scale pre-trained language models is as predictive of human eye fixation patterns during…
Transformer-based models are unable to process long sequences due to their self-attention operation, which scales quadratically with the sequence length. To address this limitation, we introduce the Longformer with an attention mechanism…
We present a series of long-context LLMs that support effective context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. Our model series are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 with longer training sequences and on a dataset where long texts…
Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…
Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks including document summarization. Typically these systems are trained by fine-tuning a large pre-trained model to the…
We present an empirical study of adapting an existing pretrained text-to-text model for long-sequence inputs. Through a comprehensive study along three axes of the pretraining pipeline -- model architecture, optimization objective, and…
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across multiple NLP tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism complexity scales quadratically with the sequence length, creating an obstacle for tasks involving long sequences, like in…
Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer have been widely applied in the filed of natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating strong performance, particularly in handling short text tasks. However, when it comes to long…
Long-context adaptation is often viewed as window scaling, but this misses a token-level supervision mismatch: in packed training with document masking, each target token's effective context remains short. We introduce EXACT, a…
Transformer models achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. They however suffer from a prohibitive limitation due to the self-attention mechanism, inducing $O(n^2)$ complexity with regard to sequence length. To…
Despite being the current de-facto models in most NLP tasks, transformers are often limited to short sequences due to their quadratic attention complexity on the number of tokens. Several attempts to address this issue were studied, either…
Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…
This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing and understanding extensive text sequences, a critical aspect in applications requiring deep comprehension and synthesis of…
We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- instead of perplexity…
Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in handling long-context tasks because of their limited effective context window size during pretraining, which restricts their ability to generalize over extended sequences.…