突破传统限制,让Transformer的残差流扩展到16路,显著提升大模型性能。
xHC: Expanded Hyper-Connections

- 用16路并行残差流替代原有单路,通过稀疏更新和时序增强写回信息
- 在180亿和280亿参数MoE模型上,相比mHC平均提升4.0分,训练成本仅小幅增加
- 提出xHC-Flash降低内存流量,使大规模扩展具备实际训练可行性
Hyper-Connections (HC) 将Transformer的残差流扩展为N条并行流,实现超越模型宽度与深度的内存扩展。Manifold-Constrained HC (mHC) 稳定了该结构在大规模下的表现。从N=1到N=4的显著性能提升表明残差流扩展是极具潜力的缩放维度。然而现有HC方法通常止步于N=4。实验发现:继续扩大mHC会带来收益递减与训练成本激增,主因是写回信息不足及残差混合开销随N立方增长。为此,我们提出xHC(Expanded Hyper-Connections),首个实现有意义超4路扩展的HC家族方法。xHC结合时序特征增强以丰富写回信息,并采用稀疏残差流架构,仅更新16条流中的4条,同时保留对完整残差状态的密集访问。在18B和28B MoE模型上,xHC表现出稳定且显著的下游性能提升。在18B MoE模型上,相比mHC平均提升4.0分,训练FLOPs仅略高于基线。缩放定律实验显示,达到相同损失,vanilla和mHC分别需1.50×和1.19×的xHC计算量。此外,大规模训练中需控制扩展残差状态带来的内存流量。因此引入xHC-Flash,将每子层内存流量从73.5C降至40C,接近mHC在N=4时的34C水平,同时保持xHC全部性能优势。xHC与xHC-Flash共同使大N残差流扩展在大模型预训练中变得有效且实用。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Hyper-Connections (HC) expand the residual stream of Transformers into $N$ parallel streams, providing a form of memory scaling beyond model width and depth. Manifold-Constrained HC (mHC) stabilizes this formulation at scale. The large gains from $N{=}1$ to $N{=}4$ suggest residual-stream expansion as a promising scaling axis. However, existing HC-family methods typically stop at $N{=}4$. Our experiments reveal why: scaling mHC beyond this point yields diminishing performance gains and rapidly increasing training cost. We attribute this limitation to two bottlenecks: insufficient write-back information for an expanding number of streams and residual-mixing generation whose cost scales cubically with $N$. To address both bottlenecks, we propose xHC (Expanded Hyper-Connections), the first HC-family method to achieve meaningful expansion beyond $N{=}4$. xHC combines temporal feature augmentation for richer write-back with a sparse residual-stream architecture that updates only $k=4$ of the $N=16$ streams while retaining dense access to the full residual state. Across 18B and 28B MoE models, xHC delivers strong and consistent downstream improvements. On an 18B MoE model, xHC improves the average downstream score by 4.0 points over mHC, while adding only modest training FLOPs over the vanilla baseline. Scaling-law experiments show that the vanilla and mHC require $1.50\times$ and $1.19\times$ the compute of xHC, respectively, to reach the same loss. Practical large-$N$ training also requires controlling memory traffic from the expanded residual state. We therefore introduce xHC-Flash, which reduces the per-sublayer memory traffic from $73.5C$ to $40C$, comparable to the $34C$ required by mHC at $N{=}4$, while retaining the gains of full xHC. Together, xHC and xHC-Flash make large-$N$ residual-stream expansion effective and practical for LLM pre-training.
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