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Main Authors: Gu, David, Belcak, Peter, Wattenhofer, Roger
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11426
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author Gu, David
Belcak, Peter
Wattenhofer, Roger
author_facet Gu, David
Belcak, Peter
Wattenhofer, Roger
contents We challenge the prevailing assumption that LLMs must rely fully on sub-word tokens for high-quality text generation. To this end, we propose the "Generative Pretrained Thoughtformer" (GPTHF), a hierarchical transformer language model capable of text generation by compressing text into sentence embeddings and employing a sentence attention mechanism. GPTHF retains GPT's architecture, modifying only token interactions via dynamic sparse attention masks. Our experiments show that GPTHF achieves an up to an order of magnitude improvement in FLOPs efficiency and a threefold increase in runtime speed compared to equally-sized GPT models in the low-size regime. This is achieved through a unique generation method that caches and reuses sentence embeddings, allowing significant portions of the input to bypass large parts of the network.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11426
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Text Compression for Efficient Language Generation
Gu, David
Belcak, Peter
Wattenhofer, Roger
Computation and Language
We challenge the prevailing assumption that LLMs must rely fully on sub-word tokens for high-quality text generation. To this end, we propose the "Generative Pretrained Thoughtformer" (GPTHF), a hierarchical transformer language model capable of text generation by compressing text into sentence embeddings and employing a sentence attention mechanism. GPTHF retains GPT's architecture, modifying only token interactions via dynamic sparse attention masks. Our experiments show that GPTHF achieves an up to an order of magnitude improvement in FLOPs efficiency and a threefold increase in runtime speed compared to equally-sized GPT models in the low-size regime. This is achieved through a unique generation method that caches and reuses sentence embeddings, allowing significant portions of the input to bypass large parts of the network.
title Text Compression for Efficient Language Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11426