Łukasz Kaiser

Also published as: Lukasz Kaiser


2022

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Hierarchical Transformers Are More Efficient Language Models
Piotr Nawrot | Szymon Tworkowski | Michał Tyrolski | Lukasz Kaiser | Yuhuai Wu | Christian Szegedy | Henryk Michalewski
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Transformer models yield impressive results on many NLP and sequence modeling tasks. Remarkably, Transformers can handle long sequences, which allows them to produce long coherent outputs: entire paragraphs produced by GPT-3 or well-structured images produced by DALL-E. These large language models are impressive but also very inefficient and costly, which limits their applications and accessibility. We postulate that having an explicit hierarchical architecture is the key to Transformers that efficiently handle long sequences. To verify this claim, we first study different ways to downsample and upsample activations in Transformers so as to make them hierarchical. We use the best performing upsampling and downsampling layers to create Hourglass - a hierarchical Transformer language model. Hourglass improves upon the Transformer baseline given the same amount of computation and can yield the same results as Transformers more efficiently. In particular, Hourglass sets new state-of-the-art for Transformer models on the ImageNet32 generation task and improves language modeling efficiency on the widely studied enwik8 benchmark.

2018

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The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation
Mia Xu Chen | Orhan Firat | Ankur Bapna | Melvin Johnson | Wolfgang Macherey | George Foster | Llion Jones | Mike Schuster | Noam Shazeer | Niki Parmar | Ashish Vaswani | Jakob Uszkoreit | Lukasz Kaiser | Zhifeng Chen | Yonghui Wu | Macduff Hughes
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The past year has witnessed rapid advances in sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) modeling for Machine Translation (MT). The classic RNN-based approaches to MT were first out-performed by the convolutional seq2seq model, which was then out-performed by the more recent Transformer model. Each of these new approaches consists of a fundamental architecture accompanied by a set of modeling and training techniques that are in principle applicable to other seq2seq architectures. In this paper, we tease apart the new architectures and their accompanying techniques in two ways. First, we identify several key modeling and training techniques, and apply them to the RNN architecture, yielding a new RNMT+ model that outperforms all of the three fundamental architectures on the benchmark WMT’14 English to French and English to German tasks. Second, we analyze the properties of each fundamental seq2seq architecture and devise new hybrid architectures intended to combine their strengths. Our hybrid models obtain further improvements, outperforming the RNMT+ model on both benchmark datasets.

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Tensor2Tensor for Neural Machine Translation
Ashish Vaswani | Samy Bengio | Eugene Brevdo | Francois Chollet | Aidan Gomez | Stephan Gouws | Llion Jones | Łukasz Kaiser | Nal Kalchbrenner | Niki Parmar | Ryan Sepassi | Noam Shazeer | Jakob Uszkoreit
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)

2015

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Sentence Compression by Deletion with LSTMs
Katja Filippova | Enrique Alfonseca | Carlos A. Colmenares | Lukasz Kaiser | Oriol Vinyals
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing