Related papers: Initialization is Critical to Whether Transformers…
Transformers have become the predominant architecture in foundation models due to their excellent performance across various domains. However, the substantial cost of scaling these models remains a significant concern. This problem arises…
Factorized layers--operations parameterized by products of two or more matrices--occur in a variety of deep learning contexts, including compressed model training, certain types of knowledge distillation, and multi-head self-attention…
The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…
Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…
State-of-the-art rehearsal-free continual learning methods exploit the peculiarities of Vision Transformers to learn task-specific prompts, drastically reducing catastrophic forgetting. However, there is a tradeoff between the number of…
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…
The extent to which neural networks are able to acquire and represent symbolic rules remains a key topic of research and debate. Much current work focuses on the impressive capabilities of large language models, as well as their often…
Overparameterized models like deep neural networks have the intriguing ability to recover target functions with fewer sampled data points than parameters (see arXiv:2307.08921). To gain insights into this phenomenon, we concentrate on a…
To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…
Finding the right initialisation for neural networks is crucial to ensure smooth training and good performance. In transformers, the wrong initialisation can lead to one of two failure modes of self-attention layers: rank collapse, where…
This paper studies how the model architecture and data configurations influence the empirical memorization capacity of generative transformers. The models are trained using synthetic text datasets derived from the Systematized Nomenclature…
Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…
Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…
Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…
Transformers pretrained via next token prediction learn to factor their world into parts, representing these factors in orthogonal subspaces of the residual stream. We formalize two representational hypotheses: (1) a representation in the…
Humans exhibit remarkable compositional reasoning by integrating knowledge from various sources. For example, if someone learns ( B = f(A) ) from one source and ( C = g(B) ) from another, they can deduce ( C=g(B)=g(f(A)) ) even without…
Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…
At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…
Transformers are widely used in state-of-the-art machine translation, but the key to their success is still unknown. To gain insight into this, we consider three groups of parameters: embeddings, attention, and feed forward neural network…