Dolphin: Long Context as a New Modality for Energy-Efficient On-Device
  Language Models
Authors: name: Wei Chen; name: Zhiyuan Li; name: Shuo Xin; name: Yihao Wang
Published: 2024-08-28 04:06:14

Abstract: This paper presents Dolphin, a novel decoder-decoder architecture for
energy-efficient processing of long contexts in language models. Our approach
addresses the significant energy consumption and latency challenges inherent in
on-device models. Dolphin employs a compact 0.5B parameter decoder to distill
extensive contextual information into a memory embedding, substantially
reducing the input length for the primary 7B parameter decoder model. Inspired
by vision-language models, we repurpose the image embedding projector to encode
long textual contexts, effectively treating extended context as a distinct
modality. This innovative method enables processing of substantially longer
contexts without the typical computational overhead associated with extended
input sequences. Empirical evaluations demonstrate a 10-fold improvement in
energy efficiency and a 5-fold reduction in latency compared to conventional
full-length context processing methods without losing quality of the response.
Our work contributes to the development of more sustainable and scalable
language models for on-device applications, addressing the critical need for
energy-efficient and responsive AI technologies in resource-constrained
environments while maintaining the accuracy to understand long contexts. This
research has implications for the broader field of natural language processing,
particularly in the domain of efficient model design for resource-limited
settings. By enabling more sophisticated AI capabilities on edge devices,
Dolphin paves the way for advanced language processing in a wide range of
applications where computational resources are at a premium. The Dolphin model
is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/NexaAIDev/Dolphin.