Linear Transformers with Learnable Kernel Functions are Better In-Context Models
Yaroslav Aksenov, Nikita Balagansky, Sofia Lo Cicero Vaina, Boris Shaposhnikov, Alexey Gorbatovski, Daniil Gavrilov
Abstract
Advancing the frontier of subquadratic architectures for Language Models (LMs) is crucial in the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing. Current innovations, including State Space Models, were initially celebrated for surpassing Transformer performance on language modeling tasks. However, these models have revealed deficiencies in essential In-Context Learning capabilities – a domain where the Transformer traditionally shines. The Based model emerged as a hybrid solution, blending a Linear Transformer with a kernel inspired by the Taylor expansion of exponential functions, augmented by convolutional networks. Mirroring the Transformer’s in-context adeptness, it became a strong contender in the field. In our work, we present a singular, elegant alteration to the Based kernel that amplifies its In-Context Learning abilities evaluated with the Multi-Query Associative Recall task and overall language modeling process, as demonstrated on the Pile dataset.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.518
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9584–9597
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.518
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yaroslav Aksenov, Nikita Balagansky, Sofia Lo Cicero Vaina, Boris Shaposhnikov, Alexey Gorbatovski, and Daniil Gavrilov. 2024. Linear Transformers with Learnable Kernel Functions are Better In-Context Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9584–9597, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Linear Transformers with Learnable Kernel Functions are Better In-Context Models (Aksenov et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.518.pdf