Phil 10.10.2024

Looks like Florida is getting hammered

Differential Transformer

  • Transformer tends to overallocate attention to irrelevant context. In this work, we introduce Diff Transformer, which amplifies attention to the relevant context while canceling noise. Specifically, the differential attention mechanism calculates attention scores as the difference between two separate softmax attention maps. The subtraction cancels noise, promoting the emergence of sparse attention patterns. Experimental results on language modeling show that Diff Transformer outperforms Transformer in various settings of scaling up model size and training tokens. More intriguingly, it offers notable advantages in practical applications, such as long-context modeling, key information retrieval, hallucination mitigation, in-context learning, and reduction of activation outliers. By being less distracted by irrelevant context, Diff Transformer can mitigate hallucination in question answering and text summarization. For in-context learning, Diff Transformer not only enhances accuracy but is also more robust to order permutation, which was considered as a chronic robustness issue. The results position Diff Transformer as a highly effective and promising architecture to advance large language models.
  • It’s interesting that “hallucinations,” which are interpolations between explicitly trained points may be a function of noise. This could be tuned to adjust the amount of “artistic license” in a model. Extremely noisy models may be the most interesting.

SBIRs

  • 9:00 standup. Also, do slides for Monday and put in a story for this new white paper
  • 9:30 Pre-proposal launch meeting
  • Do the lunchtime ride around 11:00
  • 12:50 USNA
  • 2:00 Gigantor
  • 4:30 Book club

GPT Agents

  • 2:45 LLM Meeting. Should have lots to talk about