提出跑道重连机制,提升语言模型信息传递效率
On the Runway Cascade of Transformers for Language Modeling
- 通过重连注意力路径,显式融合间接信息通道影响
- 在多个基准上实现语言建模与信息检索的稳定提升
- 无需额外参数,可无缝集成到标准Transformer中
在仅解码器(自回归)Transformer中,因果掩码形成的计算图使信息通过直接注意力路径和由中间标记构成的间接路径传播。我们称标记对之间的这些间接路径为‘跑道’。近期多项研究观察到的某些因果Transformer失效模式,可能源于这两种信息传播方式间的错位。我们形式化了‘跑道级联’现象:这种错位导致冗余和无关信息在表示中累积,即使注意力模式已充分学习。为此,我们提出‘跑道感知重连’,一种更显式地将跑道上下文融入每个标记直接路径注意力的方法。该机制基于跑道景观的摘要重构注意力模式,使模型能感知累积的影响,实现更均衡的信息传播。该方法不引入额外参数,可无缝嵌入标准注意力机制。实验表明,重连后的Transformer在通用语言建模上持续改进,并在信息检索与外推能力上表现显著更强。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In decoder-only (causal) transformers, the computation graph created by causal masking routes information through both direct-path attention and indirect paths formed by intermediate tokens. We denote these indirect paths between token pairs as their runways. We argue that certain failure modes of causal transformers as observed by a growing body of recent works are likely exacerbated by a misalignment between these two information propagation modes. We formalize runway cascade as a phenomenon whereby this misalignment results in redundancies and irrelevant information cascading to token representations despite adequately learned attention patterns. As a solution, we propose runway-aware rewiring as a more explicit way of incorporating runway context directly into each token's direct-path attention. This mechanism re-wires the attention pattern for each token based on a summary of its runway landscape, enabling awareness of accumulating representational influences and allowing for more balanced information propagation. Our proposed methodology introduces no additional parameters and can seamlessly be integrated into standard attention mechanism. Empirically, our rewired transformer results in steady improvements in general language modeling as well as noticeably stronger information retrieval and extrapolation abilities compared to standard transformers.
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