Open library
The essential reading of generative AI and agents, open in a clean reading view, with Meow and Standard summaries when available. No account needed to read.
560 papers · 558 with a Meow summary · 333 posts
The selected papers and blogs: the essential papers of generative AI and agents, and the key lab publications and essays, each with Meow and Standard summaries.
William Fedus, Barret Zoph, Noam Shazeer
In deep learning, models typically reuse the same parameters for all inputs. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models defy this and instead select different parameters for each incoming example. The result is a sparsely-activated model—with an outrageous number of parameters—but a constant computational cost. However, despite…
Barret Zoph, Irwan Bello, Sameer Kumar et al.
Scale has opened new frontiers in natural language processing -- but at a high cost. In response, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Switch Transformers have been proposed as an energy efficient path to even larger and more capable language models. But advancing the state-of-the-art across a broad set of natural language ta…
Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Antoine Roux et al.
We introduce Mixtral 8x7B, a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model. Mixtral has the same architecture as Mistral 7B, with the difference that each layer is composed of 8 feedforward blocks (i.e. experts). For every token, at each layer, a router network selects two experts to process the current state and co…
Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Chenggang Zhao, R.X. Xu, Huazuo Gao, Deli Chen, Jiashi Li, Wangding Zeng, Xingkai Yu, Y. Wu, Zhenda Xie, Y.K. Li, Panpan Huang, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan,
In the era of large language models, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a promising architecture for managing computational costs when scaling up model parameters. However, conventional MoE architectures like GShard, which activate the top-$K$ out of $N$ experts, face challenges in ensuring expert specialization, i.e. each e…
Tri Dao
Scaling Transformers to longer sequence lengths has been a major problem in the last several years, promising to improve performance in language modeling and high-resolution image understanding, as well as to unlock new applications in code, audio, and video generation. The attention layer is the main bottleneck in sc…
Jay Shah, Ganesh Bikshandi, Ying Zhang et al.
Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. FlashAttention elaborated an approach to speed up attention on GPUs through minimizing memory reads/writes. However, it has yet to take advantage of new capabilities present…
Charlie Chen, Sebastian Borgeaud, Geoffrey Irving et al.
We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer decoding by enabling the generation of multiple tokens from each transformer call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that the latency of parallel scoring of short continuations, generated by a faster but less powerful draft model, is comp…
Tim Dettmers, Artidoro Pagnoni, Ari Holtzman et al.
We present QLoRA, an efficient finetuning approach that reduces memory usage enough to finetune a 65B parameter model on a single 48GB GPU while preserving full 16-bit finetuning task performance. QLoRA backpropagates gradients through a frozen, 4-bit quantized pretrained language model into Low Rank Adapters (LoRA).…
Tim Dettmers, Mike Lewis, Younes Belkada et al.
Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory needed for inference by half while retaining full precision performance. With our…
Elias Frantar, Saleh Ashkboos, Torsten Hoefler et al.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer models, known as GPT or OPT, set themselves apart through breakthrough performance across complex language modelling tasks, but also by their extremely high computational and storage costs. Specifically, due to their massive size, even inference for large, highly-accurate GPT models…
Guangxuan Xiao, Ji Lin, Mickael Seznec et al.
Large language models (LLMs) show excellent performance but are compute- and memory-intensive. Quantization can reduce memory and accelerate inference. However, existing methods cannot maintain accuracy and hardware efficiency at the same time. We propose SmoothQuant, a training-free, accuracy-preserving, and general-…
Noam Shazeer
Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to parallelizability across the length of the sequence, incremental inference (where such…
Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong et al.
Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster inference. We (1) propose a recipe for uptraining existing multi-head language mode…
Jingyuan Liu, Jianlin Su, Xingcheng Yao et al.
Recently, the Muon optimizer ([Jordan et al., 2024](#bib.bibx16)) based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling up Muon: (1) adding weight decay and (2)…
Albert Gu, Tri Dao
Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention, gated convolution and recurrent models, and structured state space models (SSMs)…
Tri Dao, Albert Gu
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…
Albert Gu, Karan Goel, Christopher Ré
A central goal of sequence modeling is designing a single principled model that can address sequence data across a range of modalities and tasks, particularly on long-range dependencies. Although conventional models including RNNs, CNNs, and Transformers have specialized variants for capturing long dependencies, they…
Bo Peng Eric Alcaide Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak Samuel Arcadinho Stella Biderman Huanqi Cao Xin Cheng, Michael Chung Xingjian Du Matteo Grella Kranthi Kiran GV Xuzheng He et al.
Transformers have revolutionized almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks but suffer from memory and computational complexity that scales quadratically with sequence length. In contrast, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit linear scaling in memory and computational requirements but struggle to match the…
Angelos Katharopoulos, Apoorv Vyas, Nikolaos Pappas et al.
Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input’s length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the self-attention as a linear dot-product of kernel feature maps and make use of the assoc…
Ofir Press, Noah A. Smith, Mike Lewis
Since the introduction of the transformer model by [Vaswani et al. (2017)](#bib.bib39), a fundamental question has yet to be answered: how does a model achieve extrapolation at inference time for sequences that are longer than it saw during training? We first show that extrapolation can be enabled by simply changing t…
Bowen Peng, Jeffrey Quesnelle, Honglu Fan et al.
Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) have been shown to effectively encode positional information in transformer-based language models. However, these models fail to generalize past the sequence length they were trained on. We present YaRN (Yet another RoPE extensioN method), a compute-efficient method to extend the cont…
Guangxuan Xiao, Yuandong Tian, Beidi Chen et al.
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous tokens’ Key and Value states (KV) consumes extensive memory. Secondly, popular LLM…
Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Y. X. Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving efficiency while maintaining model capabilities. We present NSA, a Natively trai…
Songlin Yang, Jan Kautz, Ali Hatamizadeh
Linear Transformers have gained attention as efficient alternatives to standard Transformers, but their performance in retrieval and long-context tasks has been limited. To address these limitations, recent work has explored two distinct mechanisms: gating for adaptive memory control and the delta update rule for prec…
Cheng-Ping Hsieh, Simeng Sun, Samuel Kriman et al.
The needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, which examines the ability to retrieve a piece of information (the “needle”) from long distractor texts (the “haystack”), has been widely adopted to evaluate long-context language models (LMs). However, this simple retrieval-based test is indicative of only a superficial form of l…
Nelson F. Liu Kevin Lin John Hewitt Ashwin ParanjapeMichele Bevilacqua Fabio Petroni Percy LiangStanford University University of California, Berkeley Samaya AI
While recent language models have the ability to take long contexts as input, relatively little is known about how well they use longer context. We analyze the performance of language models on two tasks that require identifying relevant information in their input contexts: multi-document question answering and key-va…
Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, Pieter Abbeel
We present high quality image synthesis results using diffusion probabilistic models, a class of latent variable models inspired by considerations from nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Our best results are obtained by training on a weighted variational bound designed according to a novel connection between diffusion pro…
Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz et al.
By decomposing the image formation process into a sequential application of denoising autoencoders, diffusion models (DMs) achieve state-of-the-art synthesis results on image data and beyond. Additionally, their formulation allows for a guiding mechanism to control the image generation process without retraining. Howe…
Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn,, Georg Heigold, Sylvain Gelly, Jakob Uszkoreit, Neil Houlsby
While the Transformer architecture has become the de-facto standard for natural language processing tasks, its applications to computer vision remain limited. In vision, attention is either applied in conjunction with convolutional networks, or used to replace certain components of convolutional networks while keeping…
Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy et al.
State-of-the-art computer vision systems are trained to predict a fixed set of predetermined object categories. This restricted form of supervision limits their generality and usability since additional labeled data is needed to specify any other visual concept. Learning directly from raw text about images is a promis…
Aditya Ramesh, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alex Nichol et al.
Contrastive models like CLIP have been shown to learn robust representations of images that capture both semantics and style. To leverage these representations for image generation, we propose a two-stage model: a prior that generates a CLIP image embedding given a text caption, and a decoder that generates an image c…
Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, Saurabh Saxena et al.
We present Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding. Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation. Our key dis…
Yaron Lipman Ricky T. Q. Chen Heli Ben-Hamu Maximilian Nickel Matt Le
We introduce a new paradigm for generative modeling built on Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs), allowing us to train CNFs at unprecedented scale. Specifically, we present the notion of Flow Matching (FM), a simulation-free approach for training CNFs based on regressing vector fields of fixed conditional probability…
Xingchao Liu, Chengyue Gong, Qiang Liu
We present rectified flow, a surprisingly simple approach to learning (neural) ordinary differential equation (ODE) models to transport between two empirically observed distributions ${\pi}_{0}$ and ${\pi}_{1}$, hence providing a unified solution to generative modeling and domain transfer, among various other tasks in…
Patrick Esser, Sumith Kulal, Andreas Blattmann et al.
Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight l…
Yang Song, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Diederik P. Kingma et al.
Creating noise from data is easy; creating data from noise is generative modeling. We present a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that smoothly transforms a complex data distribution to a known prior distribution by slowly injecting noise, and a corresponding reverse-time SDE that transforms the prior distributio…
Paul F Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom B Brown et al.
For sophisticated reinforcement learning (RL) systems to interact usefully with real-world environments, we need to communicate complex goals to these systems. In this work, we explore goals defined in terms of (non-expert) human preferences between pairs of trajectory segments. We show that this approach can effectiv…
Nisan Stiennon, Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu et al.
As language models become more powerful, training and evaluation are increasingly bottlenecked by the data and metrics used for a particular task. For example, summarization models are often trained to predict human reference summaries and evaluated using ROUGE, but both of these metrics are rough proxies for what we…
Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang et al.
Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user’s intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users. In this paper, we show an avenue for ali…
Yuntao Bai, Andy Jones, Kamal Ndousse et al.
We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations, and is fully compatible with training for specialized skills such as python codin…