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Poster
Sparse is Enough in Scaling Transformers
Sebastian Jaszczur · Aakanksha Chowdhery · Afroz Mohiuddin · LUKASZ KAISER · Wojciech Gajewski · Henryk Michalewski · Jonni Kanerva

Fri Dec 10 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @ Virtual
in Poster Session 8 »

Large Transformer models yield impressive results on many tasks, but are expensive to train, or even fine-tune, and so slow at decoding that their use and study becomes out of reach. We address this problem by leveraging sparsity. We study sparse variants for all layers in the Transformer and propose Scaling Transformers, a family of next generation Transformer models that use sparse layers to scale efficiently and perform unbatched decoding much faster than the standard Transformer as we scale up the model size. Surprisingly, the sparse layers are enough to obtain the same perplexity as the standard Transformer with the same number of parameters. We also integrate with prior sparsity approaches to attention and enable fast inference on long sequences even with limited memory. This results in performance competitive to the state-of-the-art on long text summarization.

Keywords: Machine Learning · Transformers

Author Information

Sebastian Jaszczur (University of Warsaw)

I’m PhD student, working on improving Transformers: current research areas include conditional computation and neuron recycling.

Aakanksha Chowdhery (Google)
Afroz Mohiuddin (Google)
LUKASZ KAISER (OpenAI)
Wojciech Gajewski (Google)
Henryk Michalewski (University of Warsaw, Google)
Jonni Kanerva (Google)

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