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Tiny Transformers Excel at Sentence Compression (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Nov 11, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Small transformers squeeze a whole English sentence into a single 3-kilobyte token embedding and read it back out, instead of giving each sub-word its own embedding as usual. Even a tiny network rebuilds valid English sentences from that one token.

Abstract

It is staggering that words of the English language, which are on average represented by 5--6 bytes of ASCII, require as much as 24 kilobytes when served to large language models. We show that there is room for more information in every token embedding. We demonstrate that 1--3-layer transformers are capable of encoding and subsequently decoding standard English sentences into as little as a single 3-kilobyte token. Our work implies that even small networks can learn to construct valid English sentences and suggests the possibility of optimising large language models by moving from sub-word token embeddings towards larger fragments of text.

Peter Belcak, Roger Wattenhofer
arXiv:2410.23510 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Oct 30, 2024
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