Approximating Two-Layer Feedforward Networks for Efficient Transformers
Authors: name: Róbert Csordás; name: Kazuki Irie; name: Jürgen Schmidhuber
Published: 2023-10-16 21:23:16

Abstract: How to reduce compute and memory requirements of neural networks (NNs)
without sacrificing performance? Many recent works use sparse Mixtures of
Experts (MoEs) to build resource-efficient large language models (LMs). Here we
introduce several novel perspectives on MoEs, presenting a general framework
that unifies various methods to approximate two-layer NNs (e.g., feedforward
blocks of Transformers), including product-key memories (PKMs). Leveraging
insights from this framework, we propose methods to improve both MoEs and PKMs.
Unlike prior work that compares MoEs with dense baselines under the
compute-equal condition, our evaluation condition is parameter-equal, which is
crucial to properly evaluate LMs. We show that our MoEs are competitive with
the dense Transformer-XL on both the WikiText-103 and enwiki8 datasets at two
different scales, while being much more resource efficient. This demonstrates
that MoEs are relevant not only to extremely large LMs but also to any-scale
resource-efficient LMs. Our code is public.