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Token-free language models learn directly from raw bytes and remove the inductive bias of subword tokenization. Operating on bytes, however, results in significantly longer sequences. In this setting, standard autoregressive Transformers scale poorly as the effective memory required grows with sequence length. The recent development of the Mamba state space model (SSM) offers an appealing alternative approach with a fixed-sized memory state and efficient decoding. We propose MambaByte, a token-free adaptation of the Mamba SSM trained autoregressively on byte sequences. In terms of modeling, we show MambaByte to be competitive with, and even to outperform, state-of-the-art subword Transformers on language modeling tasks while maintaining the benefits of token-free language models, such as robustness to noise. In terms of efficiency, we develop an adaptation of speculative decoding with tokenized drafting and byte-level verification. This results in a 2.6× inference speedup to the standard MambaByte implementation, showing similar decoding efficiency as the subword Mamba. These findings establish the viability of SSMs in enabling token-free language modeling.
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LeaPformer: Enabling Linear Transformers for Autoregressive and Simultaneous Tasks via Learned Proportions
A promising approach to preserving model performance in linearized transformers is to employ position-based re-weighting functions. However, state-of-the-art re-weighting functions rely heavily on target sequence lengths, making it difficult or impossible to apply them to autoregressive and simultaneous tasks, where the target and sometimes even the input sequence length are unknown. To address this issue, we propose Learned Proportions (LeaP) and LeaPformers. Our contribution is built on two major components. First, we generalize the dependence on explicit positional representations and sequence lengths into dependence on sequence proportions for re-weighting. Second, we replace static positional representations with dynamic proportions derived via a compact module, enabling more flexible attention concentration patterns. We evaluate LeaPformer against eight representative efficient transformers on the Long-Range Arena benchmark, where we show that LeaPformer achieves the best quality-throughput trade-off, as well as apply LeaPformer to Wikitext-103b autoregressive language modeling and simultaneous speech-to-text translation for two language pairs, achieving competitive results in both tasks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2223483
- PAR ID:
- 10539867
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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