Polynomial Composition Activations: Unleashing the Dynamics of Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Zhuo, Zhijian, Wang, Ya, Zeng, Yutao, Li, Xiaoqing, Zhou, Xun, Ma, Jinwen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhuo, Zhijian
Wang, Ya
Zeng, Yutao
Li, Xiaoqing
Zhou, Xun
Ma, Jinwen
author_facet Zhuo, Zhijian
Wang, Ya
Zeng, Yutao
Li, Xiaoqing
Zhou, Xun
Ma, Jinwen
contents Transformers have found extensive applications across various domains due to the powerful fitting capabilities. This success can be partially attributed to their inherent nonlinearity. Thus, in addition to the ReLU function employed in the original transformer architecture, researchers have explored alternative modules such as GeLU and SwishGLU to enhance nonlinearity and thereby augment representational capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel category of polynomial composition activations (PolyCom), designed to optimize the dynamics of transformers. Theoretically, we provide a comprehensive mathematical analysis of PolyCom, highlighting its enhanced expressivity and efficacy relative to other activation functions. Notably, we demonstrate that networks incorporating PolyCom achieve the $\textbf{optimal approximation rate}$, indicating that PolyCom networks require minimal parameters to approximate general smooth functions in Sobolev spaces. We conduct empirical experiments on the pre-training configurations of large language models (LLMs), including both dense and sparse architectures. By substituting conventional activation functions with PolyCom, we enable LLMs to capture higher-order interactions within the data, thus improving performance metrics in terms of accuracy and convergence rates. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing substantial improvements over other activation functions. Code is available at https://github.com/BryceZhuo/PolyCom.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_03884
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Polynomial Composition Activations: Unleashing the Dynamics of Large Language Models
Zhuo, Zhijian
Wang, Ya
Zeng, Yutao
Li, Xiaoqing
Zhou, Xun
Ma, Jinwen
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Transformers have found extensive applications across various domains due to the powerful fitting capabilities. This success can be partially attributed to their inherent nonlinearity. Thus, in addition to the ReLU function employed in the original transformer architecture, researchers have explored alternative modules such as GeLU and SwishGLU to enhance nonlinearity and thereby augment representational capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel category of polynomial composition activations (PolyCom), designed to optimize the dynamics of transformers. Theoretically, we provide a comprehensive mathematical analysis of PolyCom, highlighting its enhanced expressivity and efficacy relative to other activation functions. Notably, we demonstrate that networks incorporating PolyCom achieve the $\textbf{optimal approximation rate}$, indicating that PolyCom networks require minimal parameters to approximate general smooth functions in Sobolev spaces. We conduct empirical experiments on the pre-training configurations of large language models (LLMs), including both dense and sparse architectures. By substituting conventional activation functions with PolyCom, we enable LLMs to capture higher-order interactions within the data, thus improving performance metrics in terms of accuracy and convergence rates. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing substantial improvements over other activation functions. Code is available at https://github.com/BryceZhuo/PolyCom.
title Polynomial Composition Activations: Unleashing the Dynamics of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03884