[HN Gopher] Ring attention with blockwise transformers for near-...
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       Ring attention with blockwise transformers for near-infinite
       context
        
       Author : muggermuch
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2023-10-04 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | Rather than all this effort to work around the flaws of the
       | transformer model, maybe researchers should be looking for a
       | better architecture altogether.
       | 
       | The absolutely insane amount of compute that transformers consume
       | could probably be better used for neuroevolutionary search.
        
         | treyd wrote:
         | The unreasonable effectiveness of transformer attention
         | outweighs a lot of the downsides of limited context length for
         | many applications.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | I mean ... if you think about it, attention changes the
           | effective weights of a model.
           | 
           | I am fairly certain that if you try, you can show that for
           | any particular sequence of tokens of length N, the N-1 tokens
           | induce a residual FFNN that results in exactly the same
           | distribution over the next tokens given just the Nth.
        
             | mashygpig wrote:
             | Sounds interesting, try it and share your results here :)
        
             | treyd wrote:
             | You may be interested in "Linear Transformers Are Secretly
             | Fast Weight Programmers": https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11174
        
         | ivalm wrote:
         | Why do you think so? Many people tried neuroinspired stuff and
         | had no results. Entire field of comp neurosci produced what
         | exactly over the past decade? People invest in transformers
         | because they work while everything else so far doesn't.
        
       | chaz6 wrote:
       | I am disappointed to see a paper with the phrase, in the title no
       | less, "Near-Infinite". Something is either infinite or not; there
       | can be no "near".
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | munchler wrote:
         | Maybe "unlimited" would be better?
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | It's cool to see the founder of a major company still write
       | papers.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | heisenzombie wrote:
         | Last author can mean anything from:
         | 
         | - I had the whole idea and held someone's hand the whole time
         | they did the grunt work, then I wrote the whole damn paper
         | except for making the fonts correct.
         | 
         | to:
         | 
         | - I am the boss. I am vaguely aware that someone is researching
         | something.
        
       | ctoth wrote:
       | I was reading the paper, and then it hit me ... Did they use
       | ChatGPT to generate their abstract?
       | 
       | Almost certainly not, but I wonder how well it does at that?
       | 
       | Come up with a (fake) way to improve the transformer
       | architecture, then write the title and abstract.
       | 
       | Title: Novel Cyclical Attention Mechanism Enhances Transformer
       | Architectures
       | 
       | Abstract: The transformer architecture has emerged as a powerful
       | model for handling sequential data across various domains.
       | Despite its success, the fixed nature of its attention mechanism
       | often restricts its ability to adapt to the dynamic nature of
       | real-world data sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel
       | Cyclical Attention Mechanism (CAM) that augments the standard
       | transformer architecture. Unlike conventional attention
       | mechanisms which allocate attention statically based on previous
       | layers, the CAM operates in a cyclical fashion, allowing for a
       | dynamic, recurrent redistribution of attention over the sequence
       | at each layer of the transformer. This cyclical process is
       | facilitated through a novel temporal feedback loop that
       | integrates information from both previous and subsequent layers,
       | allowing for a more nuanced understanding of long-term
       | dependencies within the data. Moreover, the proposed mechanism
       | introduces an adaptive temporal gating system that intelligently
       | modulates the flow of information through the cycles, ensuring
       | optimal retention and refinement of relevant information
       | throughout the network. We demonstrate through extensive
       | experiments on various benchmark datasets that the Cyclical
       | Attention Mechanism significantly improves the model's ability to
       | handle long-range dependencies, leading to substantial
       | improvements in performance across multiple tasks including
       | language modeling, translation, and sequence labeling. Our
       | findings pave the way for a new line of research into dynamic
       | attention mechanisms within transformer architectures, showcasing
       | the potential for enhanced performance and adaptability in
       | handling complex sequential data[1].
       | 
       | I know, I find it tiresome too when people share their ChatGPT
       | responses, but this really struck me. We are very, very close to
       | those being indistinguishable.
       | 
       | * I'd hate to be trying to sort out valid from invalid papers
       | these days.
       | 
       | * How close are AIs to doing AI research?
       | 
       | * If an AI can predict something similar to your paper, is it
       | more or less likely to be valid/true/reproduceable?
       | 
       | [1]:
       | https://chat.openai.com/share/ba769733-e98d-48d3-809a-7611f3...
        
       | chpatrick wrote:
       | Get ready for some countries putting your entire surveillance
       | logs in the LLM and asking it if you've been naughty or not,
       | automatically, every day.
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-04 23:01 UTC)