Hierarchical Associative Memory, Parallelized MLP-Mixer, and Symmetry Breaking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Karakida, Ryo, Ota, Toshihiro, Taki, Masato
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Karakida, Ryo
Ota, Toshihiro
Taki, Masato
author_facet Karakida, Ryo
Ota, Toshihiro
Taki, Masato
contents Transformers have established themselves as the leading neural network model in natural language processing and are increasingly foundational in various domains. In vision, the MLP-Mixer model has demonstrated competitive performance, suggesting that attention mechanisms might not be indispensable. Inspired by this, recent research has explored replacing attention modules with other mechanisms, including those described by MetaFormers. However, the theoretical framework for these models remains underdeveloped. This paper proposes a novel perspective by integrating Krotov's hierarchical associative memory with MetaFormers, enabling a comprehensive representation of the entire Transformer block, encompassing token-/channel-mixing modules, layer normalization, and skip connections, as a single Hopfield network. This approach yields a parallelized MLP-Mixer derived from a three-layer Hopfield network, which naturally incorporates symmetric token-/channel-mixing modules and layer normalization. Empirical studies reveal that symmetric interaction matrices in the model hinder performance in image recognition tasks. Introducing symmetry-breaking effects transitions the performance of the symmetric parallelized MLP-Mixer to that of the vanilla MLP-Mixer. This indicates that during standard training, weight matrices of the vanilla MLP-Mixer spontaneously acquire a symmetry-breaking configuration, enhancing their effectiveness. These findings offer insights into the intrinsic properties of Transformers and MLP-Mixers and their theoretical underpinnings, providing a robust framework for future model design and optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Associative Memory, Parallelized MLP-Mixer, and Symmetry Breaking
Karakida, Ryo
Ota, Toshihiro
Taki, Masato
Machine Learning
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Transformers have established themselves as the leading neural network model in natural language processing and are increasingly foundational in various domains. In vision, the MLP-Mixer model has demonstrated competitive performance, suggesting that attention mechanisms might not be indispensable. Inspired by this, recent research has explored replacing attention modules with other mechanisms, including those described by MetaFormers. However, the theoretical framework for these models remains underdeveloped. This paper proposes a novel perspective by integrating Krotov's hierarchical associative memory with MetaFormers, enabling a comprehensive representation of the entire Transformer block, encompassing token-/channel-mixing modules, layer normalization, and skip connections, as a single Hopfield network. This approach yields a parallelized MLP-Mixer derived from a three-layer Hopfield network, which naturally incorporates symmetric token-/channel-mixing modules and layer normalization. Empirical studies reveal that symmetric interaction matrices in the model hinder performance in image recognition tasks. Introducing symmetry-breaking effects transitions the performance of the symmetric parallelized MLP-Mixer to that of the vanilla MLP-Mixer. This indicates that during standard training, weight matrices of the vanilla MLP-Mixer spontaneously acquire a symmetry-breaking configuration, enhancing their effectiveness. These findings offer insights into the intrinsic properties of Transformers and MLP-Mixers and their theoretical underpinnings, providing a robust framework for future model design and optimization.
title Hierarchical Associative Memory, Parallelized MLP-Mixer, and Symmetry Breaking
topic Machine Learning
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12220