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CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation (arxiv.org)
4 points by 1xdevloper on Mar 20, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of running every word through the same heavy layers, this model sends only the important words to extra processing, cutting work on long documents. It beat the previous long-input model while training and running faster, and kept improving on inputs up to 64,000 tokens.

Abstract

Many natural language processing tasks benefit from long inputs, but processing long documents with Transformers is expensive -- not only due to quadratic attention complexity but also from applying feedforward and projection layers to every token. However, not all tokens are equally important, especially for longer documents. We propose CoLT5, a long-input Transformer model that builds on this intuition by employing conditional computation, devoting more resources to important tokens in both feedforward and attention layers. We show that CoLT5 achieves stronger performance than LongT5 with much faster training and inference, achieving SOTA on the long-input SCROLLS benchmark. Moreover, CoLT5 can effectively and tractably make use of extremely long inputs, showing strong gains up to 64k input length.

Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontañón, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai
arXiv:2303.09752 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Mar 17, 2023 · updated Oct 24, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at EMNLP 2023

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Also discussed: Mar 2023 (123 points, 17 comments)