#alibi #transformers #attention
Transformers are essentially set models that need additional inputs to make sense of sequence data. The most widespread additional inputs are position encodings or position embeddings, which add sequence index information in various forms. However, this has put a limit on the resulting model, which cannot run inference on sequences longer than it has been trained on, as it would encounter unfamiliar position encodings. ALiBi solves this by proposing simple linear fixed biases as position information, adding negligible overhead in time and memory, but surprisingly, the resulting model is able to handle inference on sequences many times as long as its training sequences.
OUTLINE:
0:00 – Intro & Overview
1:40 – Position Encodings in Transformers
4:55 – Sinusoidial Position Encodings
11:50 – ALiBi Position Encodings
20:50 – How to choose the slope parameter
23:55 – Experimental Results
29:10 – Comments & Conclusion
Paper:
Code:
Abstract:
Since the introduction of the transformer model by Vaswani et al. (2017), a fundamental question remains open: how to achieve extrapolation at inference time to longer sequences than seen during training? We first show that extrapolation can be improved by changing the position representation method, though we find that existing proposals do not allow efficient extrapolation. We introduce a simple and efficient method, Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi), that allows for extrapolation. ALiBi does not add positional embeddings to the word embeddings; instead, it biases the query-key attention scores with a term that is proportional to their distance. We show that this method allows training a 1.3 billion parameter model on input sequences of length 1024 that extrapolates to input sequences of length 2048, achieving the same perplexity as a sinusoidal position embedding model trained on inputs of length 2048, 11% faster and using 11% less memory. ALiBi’s inductive bias towards recency allows it to outperform multiple strong position methods on the WikiText-103 benchmark. Finally, we provide analysis of ALiBi to understand why it leads to better performance.
Authors: Ofir Press, Noah A. Smith, Mike Lewis
Links:
TabNine Code Completion (Referral):
YouTube:
Twitter:
Discord:
BitChute:
Minds:
Parler:
LinkedIn:
BiliBili:
If you want to support me, the best thing to do is to share out the content 🙂
If you want to support me financially (completely optional and voluntary, but a lot of people have asked for this):
SubscribeStar:
Patreon:
Bitcoin (BTC): bc1q49lsw3q325tr58ygf8sudx2dqfguclvngvy2cq
Ethereum (ETH): 0x7ad3513E3B8f66799f507Aa7874b1B0eBC7F85e2
Litecoin (LTC): LQW2TRyKYetVC8WjFkhpPhtpbDM4Vw7r9m
Monero (XMR): 4ACL8AGrEo5hAir8A9CeVrW8pEauWvnp1WnSDZxW7tziCDLhZAGsgzhRQABDnFy8yuM9fWJDviJPHKRjV4FWt19CJZN9D4n
source
