AI Technology & Industry Review
In a new paper Dualformer: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces, a Meta research team presents Dualformer, a single Transformer model that merges both fast and slow reasoning modes within a unified framework.
In a new paper Your Transformer is Secretly Linear, a research team uncovers a near-perfect linear relationship in transformations between sequential layers and introduces a novel distillation technique that approximates certain layers linearly while preserving model performance.
In a new paper LM Transparency Tool: Interactive Tool for Analyzing Transformer Language Models, a research team from Meta, University College London and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya introduces the LM Transparency Tool (LM-TT), an open-source interactive toolkit designed for dissecting Transformer-based language models.
A research team from Huawei and Peking University introduces DiJiang, a groundbreaking Frequency Domain Kernelization approach, which facilitates the transition to a linear complexity model with minimal training overhead, achieving performance akin to LLaMA2-7B across various benchmarks, but at just 1/50th of the training cost.
In a new paper HyperAttention: Long-context Attention in Near-Linear Time, a research team from Yale University and Google Research presents HyperAttention, an approximate attention mechanism not only offers practical efficiency but also delivers the best near-linear time guarantee for long contexts processing.
In a new paper Composable Function-preserving Expansions for Transformer Architectures, a research team from Google DeepMind and University of Toulouse introduces parameter expansion transformations for transformer-based neural networks while preserving functionality, enabling the expansion of the capability of the model as needed.
In a new paper General Part Assembly Planning, a research team from Columbia University and Google DeepMind introduces General Part Assembly Transformer (GPAT), a transformer-based model for assembly planning that has strong generalization capability to automatically estimate novel and diverse target and part shapes.
In a new paper LongNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000,000,000 Tokens, a Microsoft research team presents LONGNET, a Transformer variant that successfully scaling sequence to more than 1 billion tokens while maintaining stronger performance and have a linear computation complexity.
In a new paper Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis, a Google DeepMind research team proposes a new paradigm to leverage reward functions to interface language and low-level robot actions, which enables non-technical users to steer novel and intricate robot actions without large amount of data or expert knowledge to engineer low-level primitives.
In a new paper From Pixels to UI Actions: Learning to Follow Instructions via Graphical User Interfaces, a research team from Google and DeepMind proposes PIX2ACT, a Transformer-based image-to-text model that is able to generate outputs corresponding to mouse and keyboard actions based solely on pixel-based screenshots from Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs).
In a new paper Birth of a Transformer: A Memory Viewpoint, a Meta AI research team introduces a new synthetic setup to explore the structure and evolution of transformer language models, aiming to provide insights of the global vs in-context learning of LLMs.
In the new paper READ: Recurrent Adaptation of Large Transformers, a Meta AI research team proposes REcurrent ADaption (READ), a lightweight and memory-efficient fine-tuning approach that achieves a 56 percent reduction in memory consumption and an 84 percent reduction in GPU use.
In the new paper MegaByte: Predicting Million-Byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers, a Meta AI research team presents MegaByte, a multiscale decoder architecture that enables million-byte sequence modelling.
In the new paper Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers With Unlimited Length Input, a Carnegie Mellon University research team presents a general approach for improving model performance by augmenting pretrained encoder-decoder transformers with an external datastore to permit inputs of unbounded length.
In the new paper ResiDual: Transformer With Dual Residual Connections, a team from Microsoft Research, Microsoft Azure Translation, and Renmin University of China proposes ResiDual, a novel transformer architecture that fuses the connections in post-layer normalization and pre-layer normalization to exploit the benefits of both while also addressing their limitations.
In the new paper Dissecting Recall of Factual Associations in Auto-Regressive Language Models, a team from Google DeepMind, Tel Aviv University and Google Research investigates how factual associations are stored and extracted internally in transformer-based language models and provides insights on how such models’ factual predictions are formed.
In the new paper DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-Time Object Detection, a Baidu Inc. research team presents Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR), a real-time end-to-end object detector that leverages a hybrid encoder and novel IoU-aware query selection to address inference speed delay issues. RT-DETR outperforms YOLO object detectors in both accuracy and speed.
In the new paper MathPrompter: Mathematical Reasoning Using Large Language Models, a Microsoft Research team presents MathPrompter, a novel approach that leverages chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting techniques to improve LLM performance on mathematical reasoning problems and increase confidence in their predictions.
In the new paper Exphormer: Sparse Transformers for Graphs, a team from the University of British Columbia, Google Research and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute proposes Exphormer, a class of graph transformers with improved scalability and reduced computational complexity that achieves state-of-the-art performance on graph benchmarks.
In the new paper Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling, a DeepMind research team presents SpS (Speculative Sampling), an algorithm that achieves 2–2.5x decoding speedups on a 70 billion parameter Chinchilla language model. The novel approach maintains sample quality and does not require any modifications to model parameters or architecture.
In the new paper Mnemosyne: Learning to Train Transformers with Transformers, a research team from Google and Columbia University presents Mnemosyne Optimizer, a learning-to-learn system for training entire neural network architectures without any task-specific optimizer tuning.
In the new paper Continual Few-Shot Learning Using HyperTransformers, a Google Research team proposes Continual HyperTransformer, which modifies the recently published HyperTransformer few-shot learning method to sequentially update a convolutional neural network’s weights based on the information in a new task without forgetting the knowledge it learned from previous tasks.
In the new paper Tracr: Compiled Transformers as a Laboratory for Interpretability, a research team from ETH Zurich and DeepMind presents Tracr, a compiler that addresses the absence of ground truth explanations in deep neural network models by “compiling” human readable code to the weights of a transformer model.
In the new paper Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers, a Google Research team introduces Muse, a transformer-based text-to-image synthesis model that leverages masked image modelling to achieve state-of-the-art performance while being significantly faster than diffusion or autoregressive models.
In the new paper Transformer-Based Learned Optimization, a Google Research and Lund University team presents Optimus, an expressive neural network architecture for learned optimization that captures complex dependencies in the parameter space and achieves competitive results on real-world tasks and benchmark optimization problems.
In the new paper Convexifying Transformers: Improving Optimization and Understanding of Transformer Networks, a Stanford University and Google Research team provides a solid theoretical analysis of transformers’ fundamental mechanisms and introduces a novel convex analytic training framework for improving their optimization.
In the new paper Fast DistilBERT on CPUs, researchers from Intel Corporation and Intel Labs propose a pipeline and hardware-aware extreme compression technique for creating and running fast transformer models on CPUs. The approach achieves impressive speed ups and SOTA performance in production environments.
In the new paper Transformers with Multiresolution Attention Heads (currently under double-blind review for ICLR 2023), researchers propose MrsFormer, a novel transformer architecture that uses Multiresolution-head Attention to approximate output sequences and significantly reduces head redundancy without sacrificing accuracy.
In the new paper Wide Attention Is The Way Forward For Transformers, a research team from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford challenges the commonly held belief that deeper is better for transformer architectures, demonstrating that wider layers result in superior performance on natural language processing tasks.
In the new paper Foundation Transformers, a Microsoft team proposes a method for true general-purpose modelling. Their Foundation Transformer is a single unified transformer that provides guaranteed training stability and can handle diverse tasks and modalities without performance degradation.
In the new paper EcoFormer: Energy-Saving Attention with Linear Complexity, a Monash University research team presents EcoFormer, an attention mechanism with linear complexity that replaces expensive multiply-accumulate operations with simple accumulations and achieves a 73 percent energy footprint reduction on ImageNet.
In the new paper Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers, a research team from Peking University and Microsoft Research introduces a knowledge attribution method that identifies the neurons that store factual knowledge in pretrained transformers and leverages these neurons to edit factual knowledge in transformers without any fine-tuning.
In the new paper Efficient Training of Language Models to Fill in the Middle, an OpenAI research team shows that causal decoder-based autoregressive (AR) language models can learn to infill texts via a very simple and straightforward transformation to the training data and without any architectural modifications.
In the new paper Is Attention All NeRF Needs?, a research team from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the University of Texas at Austin proposes Generalizable NeRF Transformer (GNT), a pure and universal transformer-based architecture for efficient on-the-fly reconstruction of NeRFs. The work demonstrates that a pure attention mechanism suffices for learning a physically-grounded rendering process.
DeepMind researchers present a precise and compact overview of transformer architectures and formal algorithms in the new paper Formal Algorithms for Transformers.
In the new paper VCT: A Video Compression Transformer, a Google Research team presents an elegantly simple but powerful video compression transformer (VCT) that does not require architectural biases and priors and learns totally from data without any hand-crafting. VCT is easy to implement and outperforms conventional video compression approaches.
In the new paper Extreme Compression for Pre-trained Transformers Made Simple and Efficient, a Microsoft research team introduces XTC, a simple yet effective extreme compression pipeline for pretrained transformers that can achieve state-of-the-art results while reducing model size by 50x.
In the new paper A Probabilistic Interpretation of Transformers, ML Collective researcher Alexander Shim provides a probabilistic explanation of transformers’ exponential dot product attention and contrastive learning based on distributions of the exponential family.
In the new technical report OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models, Meta AI open-sources OPT, a suite of decoder-only pretrained transformers ranging from 125M to 175B parameters. The release will enable more researchers to work with large-scale language models to drive the field forward.
In the new paper CogView2: Faster and Better Text-to-Image Generation via Hierarchical Transformers, Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence researchers pretrain a Cross-Modal general Language Model (CogLM) for text and image token prediction and finetune it for fast super-resolution. The resulting CogView2 hierarchical text-to-image system achieves significant speedups while generating images with better quality at comparable resolutions.