Related papers: Why Low-Precision Transformer Training Fails: An A…
The application of transformer-based models on time series forecasting (TSF) tasks has long been popular to study. However, many of these works fail to beat the simple linear residual model, and the theoretical understanding of this issue…
Training large-scale machine learning models poses distinct system challenges, given both the size and complexity of today's workloads. Recently, many organizations training state-of-the-art Generative AI models have reported cases of…
Transformer-based architectures achieved high performance in natural language processing and computer vision, yet many studies have shown that they have not demonstrated a clear advantage in time series forecasting and even underperform…
Training Transformers on algorithmic tasks frequently demonstrates an intriguing abrupt learning phenomenon: an extended performance plateau followed by a sudden, sharp improvement. This work investigates the underlying mechanisms for such…
We study the error rate of LLMs on tasks like arithmetic that require a deterministic output, and repetitive processing of tokens drawn from a small set of alternatives. We argue that incorrect predictions arise when small errors in the…
Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…
Scaling model performance typically requires increasing model size. Looped Transformer offers a compelling alternative by iteratively reusing the same Transformer blocks, trading additional computation for improved performance without…
Recent analysis on the training dynamics of Transformers has unveiled an interesting characteristic: the training loss plateaus for a significant number of training steps, and then suddenly (and sharply) drops to near--optimal values. To…
Document-level MT models are still far from satisfactory. Existing work extend translation unit from single sentence to multiple sentences. However, study shows that when we further enlarge the translation unit to a whole document,…
Teams that have trained large Transformer-based models have reported training instabilities at large scale that did not appear when training with the same hyperparameters at smaller scales. Although the causes of such instabilities are of…
Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…
Transformer language models have driven significant progress across various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. A central component of these models is the self-attention (SA) mechanism, which learns rich…
Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t.…
Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various domains. However, the substantial hardware resources required for their training present a significant barrier to efficiency and scalability. To mitigate this…
Recently multimodal transformer models have gained popularity because their performance on language and vision tasks suggest they learn rich visual-linguistic representations. Focusing on zero-shot image retrieval tasks, we study three…
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…
The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…
As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…