Beyond Autoregression: Fast LLMs via Self-Distillation Through Time

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Deschenaux, Justin, Gulcehre, Caglar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
author_facet Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
contents Autoregressive (AR) Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across numerous tasks. However, the AR modeling paradigm presents certain limitations; for instance, contemporary autoregressive LLMs are trained to generate one token at a time, which can result in noticeable latency. Recent advances have indicated that search and repeated sampling can enhance performance in various applications, such as theorem proving, code generation, and alignment, by utilizing greater computational resources during inference. In this study, we demonstrate that diffusion language models are capable of generating at least 32 tokens simultaneously, while exceeding the performance of AR models in text quality and on the LAMBADA natural language understanding benchmark. This outcome is achieved through a novel distillation method for discrete diffusion models, which reduces the number of inference steps by a factor of 32-64. Practically, at the 1.3B parameters scale, diffusion models, even without caching, can generate tokens at a rate that is up to 8 times faster than AR models employing KV-caching, and we anticipate further improvements with the inclusion of caching. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for diffusion language models with up to 860M parameters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21035
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Autoregression: Fast LLMs via Self-Distillation Through Time
Deschenaux, Justin
Gulcehre, Caglar
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Autoregressive (AR) Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across numerous tasks. However, the AR modeling paradigm presents certain limitations; for instance, contemporary autoregressive LLMs are trained to generate one token at a time, which can result in noticeable latency. Recent advances have indicated that search and repeated sampling can enhance performance in various applications, such as theorem proving, code generation, and alignment, by utilizing greater computational resources during inference. In this study, we demonstrate that diffusion language models are capable of generating at least 32 tokens simultaneously, while exceeding the performance of AR models in text quality and on the LAMBADA natural language understanding benchmark. This outcome is achieved through a novel distillation method for discrete diffusion models, which reduces the number of inference steps by a factor of 32-64. Practically, at the 1.3B parameters scale, diffusion models, even without caching, can generate tokens at a rate that is up to 8 times faster than AR models employing KV-caching, and we anticipate further improvements with the inclusion of caching. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for diffusion language models with up to 860M parameters.
title Beyond Autoregression: Fast LLMs via Self-Distillation Through Time
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21035