Simple linear attention language models balance the recall-throughput
  tradeoff
Authors: name: Simran Arora; name: Sabri Eyuboglu; name: Michael Zhang; name: Aman Timalsina; name: Silas Alberti; name: Dylan Zinsley; name: James Zou; name: Atri Rudra; name: Christopher Ré
Published: 2024-02-28 19:28:27

Abstract: Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall,
the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context.
However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during
inference by the KV-cache's aggressive memory consumption. In this work, we
explore whether we can improve language model efficiency (e.g. by reducing
memory consumption) without compromising on recall. By applying experiments and
theory to a broad set of architectures, we identify a key tradeoff between a
model's state size and recall ability. We show that efficient alternatives to
attention (e.g. H3, Mamba, RWKV) maintain a fixed-size recurrent state, but
struggle at recall. We propose BASED a simple architecture combining linear and
sliding window attention. By varying BASED window size and linear attention
feature dimension, we can dial the state size and traverse the pareto frontier
of the recall-memory tradeoff curve, recovering the full quality of attention
on one end and the small state size of attention-alternatives on the other. We
train language models up to 1.3b parameters and show that BASED matches the
strongest sub-quadratic models (e.g. Mamba) in perplexity and outperforms them
on real-world recall-intensive tasks by 6.22 accuracy points. Implementations
of linear attention are often less efficient than optimized standard attention
implementations. To make BASED competitive, we develop IO-aware algorithms that
enable 24x higher throughput on language generation than FlashAttention-2, when
generating 1024 tokens using 1.3b parameter models. Code for this work is
provided at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/based.