Transformer Layers as Painters

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sun, Qi, Pickett, Marc, Nain, Aakash Kumar, Jones, Llion
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Sun, Qi
Pickett, Marc
Nain, Aakash Kumar
Jones, Llion
author_facet Sun, Qi
Pickett, Marc
Nain, Aakash Kumar
Jones, Llion
contents Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a pretrained transformer. Such an understanding could both yield better usage of existing models as well as to make architectural improvements to produce new variants. We present a series of empirical studies on frozen models that show that the lower and final layers of pretrained transformers differ from middle layers, but that middle layers have a surprising amount of uniformity. We further show that some classes of problems have robustness to skipping layers, running the layers in an order different from how they were trained, or running the layers in parallel. Our observations suggest that even frozen pretrained models may gracefully trade accuracy for latency by skipping layers or running layers in parallel.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_09298
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transformer Layers as Painters
Sun, Qi
Pickett, Marc
Nain, Aakash Kumar
Jones, Llion
Computation and Language
Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a pretrained transformer. Such an understanding could both yield better usage of existing models as well as to make architectural improvements to produce new variants. We present a series of empirical studies on frozen models that show that the lower and final layers of pretrained transformers differ from middle layers, but that middle layers have a surprising amount of uniformity. We further show that some classes of problems have robustness to skipping layers, running the layers in an order different from how they were trained, or running the layers in parallel. Our observations suggest that even frozen pretrained models may gracefully trade accuracy for latency by skipping layers or running layers in parallel.
title Transformer Layers as Painters
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09298