Trainable Transformer in Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Panigrahi, Abhishek, Malladi, Sadhika, Xia, Mengzhou, Arora, Sanjeev
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Panigrahi, Abhishek
Malladi, Sadhika
Xia, Mengzhou
Arora, Sanjeev
author_facet Panigrahi, Abhishek
Malladi, Sadhika
Xia, Mengzhou
Arora, Sanjeev
contents Recent works attribute the capability of in-context learning (ICL) in large pre-trained language models to implicitly simulating and fine-tuning an internal model (e.g., linear or 2-layer MLP) during inference. However, such constructions require large memory overhead, which makes simulation of more sophisticated internal models intractable. In this work, we propose an efficient construction, Transformer in Transformer (in short, TinT), that allows a transformer to simulate and fine-tune complex models internally during inference (e.g., pre-trained language models). In particular, we introduce innovative approximation techniques that allow a TinT model with less than 2 billion parameters to simulate and fine-tune a 125 million parameter transformer model within a single forward pass. TinT accommodates many common transformer variants and its design ideas also improve the efficiency of past instantiations of simple models inside transformers. We conduct end-to-end experiments to validate the internal fine-tuning procedure of TinT on various language modeling and downstream tasks. For example, even with a limited one-step budget, we observe TinT for a OPT-125M model improves performance by 4-16% absolute on average compared to OPT-125M. These findings suggest that large pre-trained language models are capable of performing intricate subroutines. To facilitate further work, a modular and extensible codebase for TinT is included.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_01189
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trainable Transformer in Transformer
Panigrahi, Abhishek
Malladi, Sadhika
Xia, Mengzhou
Arora, Sanjeev
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Recent works attribute the capability of in-context learning (ICL) in large pre-trained language models to implicitly simulating and fine-tuning an internal model (e.g., linear or 2-layer MLP) during inference. However, such constructions require large memory overhead, which makes simulation of more sophisticated internal models intractable. In this work, we propose an efficient construction, Transformer in Transformer (in short, TinT), that allows a transformer to simulate and fine-tune complex models internally during inference (e.g., pre-trained language models). In particular, we introduce innovative approximation techniques that allow a TinT model with less than 2 billion parameters to simulate and fine-tune a 125 million parameter transformer model within a single forward pass. TinT accommodates many common transformer variants and its design ideas also improve the efficiency of past instantiations of simple models inside transformers. We conduct end-to-end experiments to validate the internal fine-tuning procedure of TinT on various language modeling and downstream tasks. For example, even with a limited one-step budget, we observe TinT for a OPT-125M model improves performance by 4-16% absolute on average compared to OPT-125M. These findings suggest that large pre-trained language models are capable of performing intricate subroutines. To facilitate further work, a modular and extensible codebase for TinT is included.
title Trainable Transformer in Transformer
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01189