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 language | American English |
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Journal | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems |
Volume | 2020-December |
State | Published - 2020 |
Event | 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020 - Virtual, Online Duration: 6 Dec 2020 → 12 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.