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Grokking of Hierarchical Structure in Vanilla Transformers (arxiv.org)
6 points by wwarner on Jun 3, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Plain transformers kept training long after accuracy on familiar sentences stopped improving, then learned to generalize to new structures using their tree-like hierarchy. Middle-depth models did this best, beating shallow and deep ones; a measure of how tree-like their representations are predicts the best depth.

Abstract

For humans, language production and comprehension is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of sentences. In natural language processing, past work has questioned how effectively neural sequence models like transformers capture this hierarchical structure when generalizing to structurally novel inputs. We show that transformer language models can learn to generalize hierarchically after training for extremely long periods -- far beyond the point when in-domain accuracy has saturated. We call this phenomenon \emph{structural grokking}. On multiple datasets, structural grokking exhibits inverted U-shaped scaling in model depth: intermediate-depth models generalize better than both very deep and very shallow transformers. When analyzing the relationship between model-internal properties and grokking, we find that optimal depth for grokking can be identified using the tree-structuredness metric of \citet{murty2023projections}. Overall, our work provides strong evidence that, with extended training, vanilla transformers discover and use hierarchical structure.

Shikhar Murty, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas, Christopher D. Manning
arXiv:2305.18741 · cs.CL · submitted May 30, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · ACL 2023

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