Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of the old version, about twice the length. Notations Symbol Meaning $d$ The model size / hidden state dimension / positional encoding size....
[Updated on 2023-01-24: add a small section on Distillation.] Large transformer models are mainstream nowadays, creating SoTA results for a variety of tasks. They are powerful but very expensive to train and use. The extremely high inference cost, in both time and memory, is a big bottleneck for adopting a powerful transformer for solving real-world tasks at scale. Why is it hard to run inference for large transformer models? Besides the increasing size of SoTA models, there are two main factors contributing to the inference challenge (Pope et al....
Neural networks are well known to be over-parameterized and can often easily fit data with near-zero training loss with decent generalization performance on test dataset. Although all these parameters are initialized at random, the optimization process can consistently lead to similarly good outcomes. And this is true even when the number of model parameters exceeds the number of training data points. Neural tangent kernel (NTK) (Jacot et al. 2018) is a kernel to explain the evolution of neural networks during training via gradient descent....
[Updated on 2022-03-13: add expert choice routing.] [Updated on 2022-06-10]: Greg and I wrote a shorted and upgraded version of this post, published on OpenAI Blog: “Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks” In recent years, we are seeing better results on many NLP benchmark tasks with larger pre-trained language models. How to train large and deep neural networks is challenging, as it demands a large amount of GPU memory and a long horizon of training time....
[Updated on 2023-01-27: After almost three years, I did a big refactoring update of this post to incorporate a bunch of new Transformer models since 2020. The enhanced version of this post is here: The Transformer Family Version 2.0. Please refer to that post on this topic.] It has been almost two years since my last post on attention. Recent progress on new and enhanced versions of Transformer motivates me to write another post on this specific topic, focusing on how the vanilla Transformer can be improved for longer-term attention span, less memory and computation consumption, RL task solving and more....
[Updated on 2019-05-27: add the section on Lottery Ticket Hypothesis.] If you are like me, entering into the field of deep learning with experience in traditional machine learning, you may often ponder over this question: Since a typical deep neural network has so many parameters and training error can easily be perfect, it should surely suffer from substantial overfitting. How could it be ever generalized to out-of-sample data points? The effort in understanding why deep neural networks can generalize somehow reminds me of this interesting paper on System Biology — “Can a biologist fix a radio?...
Professor Naftali Tishby passed away in 2021. Hope the post can introduce his cool idea of information bottleneck to more people. Recently I watched the talk “Information Theory in Deep Learning” by Prof Naftali Tishby and found it very interesting. He presented how to apply the information theory to study the growth and transformation of deep neural networks during training. Using the Information Bottleneck (IB) method, he proposed a new learning bound for deep neural networks (DNN), as the traditional learning theory fails due to the exponentially large number of parameters....
The machine learning models have started penetrating into critical areas like health care, justice systems, and financial industry. Thus to figure out how the models make the decisions and make sure the decisioning process is aligned with the ethnic requirements or legal regulations becomes a necessity. Meanwhile, the rapid growth of deep learning models pushes the requirement of interpreting complicated models further. People are eager to apply the power of AI fully on key aspects of everyday life....
(The post was originated from my talk for WiMLDS x Fintech meetup hosted by Affirm.) I believe many of you have watched or heard of the games between AlphaGo and professional Go player Lee Sedol in 2016. Lee has the highest rank of nine dan and many world championships. No doubt, he is one of the best Go players in the world, but he lost by 1-4 in this series versus AlphaGo....