Limits to depth-efficiencies of self-attention

Yoav Levine, Noam Wies, Or Sharir, Hofit Bata, Amnon Shashua

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Self-attention architectures, which are rapidly pushing the frontier in natural language processing, demonstrate a surprising depth-inefficient behavior: previous works indicate that increasing the internal representation (network width) is just as useful as increasing the number of self-attention layers (network depth). We theoretically predict a width-dependent transition between depth-efficiency and depth-inefficiency in self-attention. We conduct systematic empirical ablations on networks of depths 6 to 48 that clearly reveal the theoretically predicted behaviors, and provide explicit quantitative suggestions regarding the optimal depth-to-width allocation for a given self-attention network size. The race towards beyond 1-Trillion parameter language models renders informed guidelines for increasing self-attention depth and width in tandem an essential ingredient. Our guidelines elucidate the depth-to-width trade-off in self-attention networks of sizes up to the scale of GPT3 (which is too deep for its size), and beyond, marking an unprecedented width of 30K as optimal for a 1-Trillion parameter self-attention network.

Original languageAmerican English
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume2020-December
StatePublished - 2020
Event34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 6 Dec 202012 Dec 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Daniel Jannai for assistance in the experiments, and Jared Kaplan for the permission to use the figure in Kaplan et al. [2020]. This research was supported by the ERC (European Research Council) and the ISF (Israel Science Foundation). Experiments were performed with Cloud TPUs and supported by Google’s TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC). Yoav Levine was supported by the Israel Academy of Sciences Adams fellowship.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.

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