Related papers: Linear attention is (maybe) all you need (to under…
Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…
Understanding whether deep neural networks are effectively optimized remains challenging, as training occurs in highly nonconvex landscapes and standard metrics provide limited visibility into layer-wise learning quality. This challenge is…
This document aims to be a self-contained, mathematically precise overview of transformer architectures and algorithms (*not* results). It covers what transformers are, how they are trained, what they are used for, their key architectural…
Transformers pretrained on diverse tasks exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to solve unseen tasks solely based on input contexts without adjusting model parameters. In this paper, we study ICL in one of…
We train a linear attention transformer on millions of masked-block matrix completion tasks: each prompt is masked low-rank matrix whose missing block may be (i) a scalar prediction target or (ii) an unseen kernel slice of Nystr\"om…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…
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…
Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting,…
In modern deep learning, the models are learned by applying gradient updates using an optimizer, which transforms the updates based on various statistics. Optimizers are often hand-designed and tuning their hyperparameters is a big part of…
Transformers have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, raising the question of whether they can serve as metalearners that adapt to new tasks using only a small number of in-context examples, without any further…
Transformers have been matching deep convolutional networks for vision architectures in recent works. Most work is focused on getting the best results on large-scale benchmarks, and scaling laws seem to be the most successful strategy:…
Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…
Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…
Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, seeks to design algorithms that can utilize previous experience to rapidly learn new skills or adapt to new environments. Representation learning -- a key tool for performing meta-learning -- learns a…
In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…
Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…
The increasing scale of Transformer models has led to an increase in their pre-training computational requirements. While quantization has proven to be effective after pre-training and during fine-tuning, applying quantization in…
The Transformer is an extremely powerful and prominent deep learning architecture. In this work, we challenge the commonly held belief in deep learning that going deeper is better, and show an alternative design approach that is building…
The usage of transformers has grown from learning about language semantics to forming meaningful visiolinguistic representations. These architectures are often over-parametrized, requiring large amounts of computation. In this work, we…