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TransformerFAM: Feedback attention is working memory (arxiv.org)
4 points by tosh on Apr 16, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of looking only at the words in front of it, the model loops its internal summaries back in as context, giving it a working memory with no new weights. It beat the usual setup on long inputs at sizes from 1B to 24B.

Abstract

While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages a feedback loop to enable the network to attend to its own latent representations. This design fosters the emergence of working memory within the Transformer, allowing it to process indefinitely long sequences. TransformerFAM requires no additional weights, enabling seamless integration with pre-trained models. Our experiments show that TransformerFAM significantly improves Transformer performance on long-context tasks across various model sizes (1B, 8B, and 24B). These results showcase the potential to empower Large Language Models (LLMs) to process sequences of unlimited length.

Dongseong Hwang, Weiran Wang, Zhuoyuan Huo, Khe Chai Sim, Pedro Moreno Mengibar
arXiv:2404.09173 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Apr 14, 2024 · updated May 7, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 26 pages, 12 figures, 14 tables

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