Transformer models

In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output. Crucially, in-context learning happens only at inference time without any parameter updates to the model. While large language models such as GPT-3 exhibit some ability to perform in-context learning, it is unclear what the relationship is between tasks on which this succeeds and what is present in the training data. To make progress towards understanding in-context learning, we consider the well-defined problem of training a model to in-context learn a function class (e.g., linear functions): that is, given data derived from some functions in the class, can we train a model to in-context learn "most" functions from this class? We show empirically that standard Transformers can be trained from scratch to perform in-context learning of linear functions -- that is, the trained model is able to learn unseen linear functions from in-context examples with performance comparable to the optimal least squares estimator. In fact, in-context learning is possible even under two forms of distribution shift: (i) between the training data of the model and inference-time prompts, and (ii) between the in-context examples and the query input during inference. We also show that we can train Transformers to in-context learn more complex function classes -- namely sparse linear functions, two-layer neural networks, and decision trees -- with performance that matches or exceeds task-specific learning algorithms. Our code and models are available at this https URL .

Neural sequence models, especially transformers, exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples $(x, f(x))$ presented in the input without further parameter updates. We investigate the hypothesis that transformer-based in-context learners implement standard learning algorithms implicitly, by encoding smaller models in their activations, and updating these implicit models as new examples appear in the context. Using linear regression as a prototypical problem, we offer three sources of evidence for this hypothesis. First, we prove by construction that transformers can implement learning algorithms for linear models based on gradient descent and closed-form ridge regression. Second, we show that trained in-context learners closely match the predictors computed by gradient descent, ridge regression, and exact least-squares regression, transitioning between different predictors as transformer depth and dataset noise vary, and converging to Bayesian estimators for large widths and depths. Third, we present preliminary evidence that in-context learners share algorithmic features with these predictors: learners' late layers non-linearly encode weight vectors and moment matrices. These results suggest that in-context learning is understandable in algorithmic terms, and that (at least in the linear case) learners may rediscover standard estimation algorithms. Code and reference implementations are released at this https URL.

Uncertainty estimation (UE) of model predictions is a crucial step for a variety of tasks such as active learning, misclassification detection, adversarial attack detection, out-of-distribution detection, etc. Most of the works on modeling the uncertainty of deep neural networks evaluate these methods on image classification tasks. Little attention has been paid to UE in natural language processing. To fill this gap, we perform a vast empirical investigation of state-of-the-art UE methods for Transformer models on misclassification detection in named entity recognition and text classification tasks and propose two computationally efficient modifications, one of which approaches or even outperforms computationally intensive methods1.

Transformers have become an important workhorse of machine learning, with numerous applications. This necessitates the development of reliable methods for increasing their transparency. Multiple interpretability methods, often based on gradient information, have been proposed. We show that the gradient in a Transformer reflects the function only locally, and thus fails to reliably identify the contribution of input features to the prediction. We identify Attention Heads and LayerNorm as the main reasons for such unreliable explanations and propose a more stable way for propagation through these layers. Our proposal, which can be seen as a proper extension of the well-established LRP method to Transformers, is shown both theoretically and empirically to overcome the deficiency of a simple gradient-based approach, and achieves state-of-the-art explanation performance on a broad range of Transformer models and datasets.

Pruning is an effective way to reduce the huge inference cost of Transformer models. However, prior work on pruning Transformers requires retraining the models. This can add high training cost and high complexity to model deployment, making it difficult to use in many practical situations. To address this, we propose a fast post-training pruning framework for Transformers that does not require any retraining. Given a resource constraint and a sample dataset, our framework automatically prunes the Transformer model using structured sparsity methods. To retain high accuracy without retraining, we introduce three novel techniques: (i) a lightweight mask search algorithm that finds which heads and filters to prune based on the Fisher information; (ii) mask rearrangement that complements the search algorithm; and (iii) mask tuning that reconstructs the output activations for each layer. We apply our method to BERT_BASE and DistilBERT, and we evaluate its effectiveness on GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our framework achieves up to 2.0× reduction in FLOPs and 1.56× speedup in inference latency, while maintaining < 1% loss in accuracy. Importantly, our framework prunes Transformers in less than 3 minutes on a single GPU, which is over two orders of magnitude faster than existing pruning approaches that retrain the models.1

We address efficient calculation of influence functions for tracking predictions back to the training data. We propose and analyze a new approach to speeding up the inverse Hessian calculation based on Arnoldi iteration. With this improvement, we achieve, to the best of our knowledge, the first successful implementation of influence functions that scales to full-size (language and vision) Transformer models with several hundreds of millions of parameters. We evaluate our approach on image classification and sequence-to-sequence tasks with tens to a hundred of millions of training examples. Our code will be available at https://github.com/google-research/jax-influence.

While Transformers have been the main architecture behind deep learning's success in language modeling, state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba have recently been shown to match or outperform Transformers at small to medium scale. We show that these families of models are actually quite closely related, and develop a rich framework of theoretical connections between SSMs and variants of attention, connected through various decompositions of a well-studied class of structured semiseparable matrices. Our state space duality (SSD) framework allows us to design a new architecture (Mamba-2) whose core layer is an a refinement of Mamba's selective SSM that is 2-8X faster, while continuing to be competitive with Transformers on language modeling.

We introduce a framework that abstracts Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a sequence modeling problem. This allows us to draw upon the simplicity and scalability of the Transformer architecture, and associated advances in language modeling such as GPT-x and BERT. In particular, we present Decision Transformer, an architecture that casts the problem of RL as conditional sequence modeling. Unlike prior approaches to RL that fit value functions or compute policy gradients, Decision Transformer simply outputs the optimal actions by leveraging a causally masked Transformer. By conditioning an autoregressive model on the desired return (reward), past states, and actions, our Decision Transformer model can generate future actions that achieve the desired return. Despite its simplicity, Decision Transformer matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art model-free offline RL baselines on Atari, OpenAI Gym, and Key-to-Door tasks.

Recent work suggests that transformer language models show a bias towards human languages over unnatural ("impossible") languages argued to be unacquirable by humans. However, this literature has largely based these claims on differences in sample efficiency and test-set perplexity, rather than on direct evaluations of the linguistic capacities that could plausibly explain non-attestation in human languages. We evaluate two theoretically motivated linking hypotheses: impossibility arising from deficiencies in grammatical sensitivity or generative production. Using GPT-2 style models trained on perturbed "impossible" variants of English, we measure sensitivity to grammaticality using BLiMP minimal pairs, finding that model performance exhibits only gradual degradation, mediated by the language's information locality. In contrast, these models exhibited pronounced failures in generation, producing substantially fewer high-quality sentences at longer lengths. Together, these results suggest generative deficiency and transmission failures as a plausible linking hypothesis between language model behaviour and non-attestation of impossible languages.

Recently, there has been a surge of Transformer-based solutions for the long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) task. Despite the growing performance over the past few years, we question the validity of this line of research in this work. Specifically, Transformers is arguably the most successful solution to extract the semantic correlations among the elements in a long sequence. However, in time series modeling, we are to extract the temporal relations in an ordered set of continuous points. While employing positional encoding and using tokens to embed sub-series in Transformers facilitate preserving some ordering information, the nature of the permutation-invariant self-attention mechanism inevitably results in temporal information loss. To validate our claim, we introduce a set of embarrassingly simple one-layer linear models named LTSF-Linear for comparison. Experimental results on nine real-life datasets show that LTSF-Linear surprisingly outperforms existing sophisticated Transformer-based LTSF models in all cases, and often by a large margin. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive empirical studies to explore the impacts of various design elements of LTSF models on their temporal relation extraction capability. We hope this surprising finding opens up new research directions for the LTSF task. We also advocate revisiting the validity of Transformer-based solutions for other time series analysis tasks (e.g., anomaly detection) in the future.

The dot product self-attention is known to be central and indispensable to state-of-the-art Transformer models. But is it really required? This paper investigates the true importance and contribution of the dot product-based self-attention mechanism on the performance of Transformer models. Via extensive experiments, we find that (1) random alignment matrices surprisingly perform quite competitively and (2) learning attention weights from token-token (query-key) interactions is useful but not that important after all. To this end, we propose \textsc{Synthesizer}, a model that learns synthetic attention weights without token-token interactions. In our experiments, we first show that simple Synthesizers achieve highly competitive performance when compared against vanilla Transformer models across a range of tasks, including machine translation, language modeling, text generation and GLUE/SuperGLUE benchmarks. When composed with dot product attention, we find that Synthesizers consistently outperform Transformers. Moreover, we conduct additional comparisons of Synthesizers against Dynamic Convolutions, showing that simple Random Synthesizer is not only 60% faster but also improves perplexity by a relative 3.5%. Finally, we show that simple factorized Synthesizers can outperform Linformers on encoding only tasks.