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  • Continuum
  • Data
    • Datasets
      • Pre Training Data
      • Types of Fine Tuning
      • Self Instruct Paper
      • Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation
      • Systematic Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models on Open Datasets
      • Instruction Tuning
      • Instruction Fine Tuning - Alpagasus
      • Less is More For Alignment
      • Enhanced Supervised Fine Tuning
      • Visualising Data using t-SNE
      • UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction
      • Training and Evaluation Datasets
      • What is perplexity?
  • MODELS
    • Foundation Models
      • The leaderboard
      • Foundation Models
      • LLama 2 - Analysis
      • Analysis of Llama 3
      • Llama 3.1 series
      • Google Gemini 1.5
      • Platypus: Quick, Cheap, and Powerful Refinement of LLMs
      • Mixtral of Experts
      • Mixture-of-Agents (MoA)
      • Phi 1.5
        • Refining the Art of AI Training: A Deep Dive into Phi 1.5's Innovative Approach
      • Phi 2.0
      • Phi-3 Technical Report
  • Training
    • The Fine Tuning Process
      • Why fine tune?
        • Does Fine-Tuning LLMs on New Knowledge Encourage Hallucinations?
        • Explanations in Fine Tuning
      • Tokenization
        • Tokenization Is More Than Compression
        • Tokenization - SentencePiece
        • Tokenization explore
        • Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial?
        • Getting the most out of your tokenizer for pre-training and domain adaptation
        • TokenMonster
      • Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning
        • P-Tuning
          • The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning
        • Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation
        • Harnessing the Power of PEFT: A Smarter Approach to Fine-tuning Pre-trained Models
        • What is Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) - explained by the inventor
        • Low Rank Adaptation (Lora)
        • Practical Tips for Fine-tuning LMs Using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
        • QLORA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs
        • Bits and Bytes
        • The Magic behind Qlora
        • Practical Guide to LoRA: Tips and Tricks for Effective Model Adaptation
        • The quantization constant
        • QLORA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized Language Models
        • QLORA and Fine-Tuning of Quantized Language Models (LMs)
        • ReLoRA: High-Rank Training Through Low-Rank Updates
        • SLoRA: Federated Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Language Models
        • GaLora: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projection
      • Hyperparameters
        • Batch Size
        • Padding Tokens
        • Mixed precision training
        • FP8 Formats for Deep Learning
        • Floating Point Numbers
        • Batch Size and Model loss
        • Batch Normalisation
        • Rethinking Learning Rate Tuning in the Era of Language Models
        • Sample Packing
        • Gradient accumulation
        • A process for choosing the learning rate
        • Learning Rate Scheduler
        • Checkpoints
        • A Survey on Efficient Training of Transformers
        • Sequence Length Warmup
        • Understanding Training vs. Evaluation Data Splits
        • Cross-entropy loss
        • Weight Decay
        • Optimiser
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      • Training Processes
        • Extending the context window
        • PyTorch Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP)
        • Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation
        • YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models
        • Sliding Window Attention
        • LongRoPE
        • Reinforcement Learning
        • An introduction to reinforcement learning
        • Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
        • Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model
  • INFERENCE
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      • SLORA
  • KNOWLEDGE
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      • Using the Output Embedding to Improve Language Models
      • Decoding Sentence-BERT
      • ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT
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      • Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage Retriever
      • Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models
      • Massive Text Embedding Benchmark
      • RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking
      • LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
      • Embedding and Fine-Tuning in Neural Language Models
      • Embedding Model Construction
      • Demystifying Embedding Spaces using Large Language Models
      • Fine-Tuning Llama for Multi-Stage Text Retrieval
      • Large Language Model Based Text Augmentation Enhanced Personality Detection Model
      • One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings
      • Vector Databases are not the only solution
      • Knowledge Graphs
        • Harnessing Knowledge Graphs to Elevate AI: A Technical Exploration
        • Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap
      • Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN)
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      • Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
      • Vector Similarity Search - HNSW
      • FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search)
      • Unsupervised Dense Retrievers
    • Retrieval Augmented Generation
      • Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey
      • Fine-Tuning or Retrieval?
      • Revolutionising Information Retrieval: The Power of RAG in Language Models
      • A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation
      • REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training
      • Retrieve Anything To Augment Large Language Models
      • Generate Rather Than Retrieve: Large Language Models Are Strong Context Generators
      • Active Retrieval Augmented Generation
      • DSPy: LM Assertions: Enhancing Language Model Pipelines with Computational Constraints
      • DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls
      • DSPy: In-Context Learning for Extreme Multi-Label Classification
      • Optimizing Instructions and Demonstrations for Multi-Stage Language Model Programs
      • HYDE: Revolutionising Search with Hypothetical Document Embeddings
      • Enhancing Recommender Systems with Large Language Model Reasoning Graphs
      • Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) versus fine tuning
      • RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG
      • Summarisation Methods and RAG
      • Lessons Learned on LLM RAG Solutions
      • Stanford: Retrieval Augmented Language Models
      • Overview of RAG Approaches with Vector Databases
      • Mastering Chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems
    • Semantic Routing
    • Resource Description Framework (RDF)
  • AGENTS
    • What is agency?
      • Rephrase and Respond: Let Large Language Models Ask Better Questions for Themselves
      • Types of Agents
      • The risk of AI agency
      • Understanding Personality in Large Language Models: A New Frontier in AI Psychology
      • AI Agents - Reasoning, Planning, and Tool Calling
      • Personality and Brand
      • Agent Interaction via APIs
      • Bridging Minds and Machines: The Legacy of Newell, Shaw, and Simon
      • A Survey on Language Model based Autonomous Agents
      • Large Language Models as Agents
      • AI Reasoning: A Deep Dive into Chain-of-Thought Prompting
      • Enhancing AI Reasoning with Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR)
      • Exploring the Frontier of AI: The "Tree of Thoughts" Framework
      • Toolformer: Revolutionising Language Models with API Integration - An Analysis
      • TaskMatrix.AI: Bridging Foundational AI Models with Specialised Systems for Enhanced Task Completion
      • Unleashing the Power of LLMs in API Integration: The Rise of Gorilla
      • Andrew Ng's presentation on AI agents
      • Making AI accessible with Andrej Karpathy and Stephanie Zhan
  • Regulation and Ethics
    • Regulation and Ethics
      • Privacy
      • Detecting AI Generated content
      • Navigating the IP Maze in AI: The Convergence of Blockchain, Web 3.0, and LLMs
      • Adverse Reactions to generative AI
      • Navigating the Ethical Minefield: The Challenge of Security in Large Language Models
      • Navigating the Uncharted Waters: The Risks of Autonomous AI in Military Decision-Making
  • DISRUPTION
    • Data Architecture
      • What is a data pipeline?
      • What is Reverse ETL?
      • Unstructured Data and Generatve AI
      • Resource Description Framework (RDF)
      • Integrating generative AI with the Semantic Web
    • Search
      • BM25 - Search Engine Ranking Function
      • BERT as a reranking engine
      • BERT and Google
      • Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
      • Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs
      • FOLLOWIR: Evaluating and Teaching Information Retrieval Models to Follow Instructions
      • Neural Collaborative Filtering
      • Federated Neural Collaborative Filtering
      • Latent Space versus Embedding Space
      • Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models
    • Recommendation Engines
      • On Interpretation and Measurement of Soft Attributes for Recommendation
      • A Survey on Large Language Models for Recommendation
      • Model driven recommendation systems
      • Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations
      • Foundation Models for Recommender Systems
      • Exploring the Impact of Large Language Models on Recommender Systems: An Extensive Review
      • AI driven recommendations - harming autonomy?
    • Logging
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      • Deeplog
      • LogBERT: Log Anomaly Detection via BERT
      • Experience Report: Deep Learning-based System Log Analysis for Anomaly Detection
      • Log-based Anomaly Detection with Deep Learning: How Far Are We?
      • Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection in Log Data: A Survey
      • LogGPT
      • Adaptive Semantic Gate Networks (ASGNet) for log-based anomaly diagnosis
  • Infrastructure
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      • TCO of NVIDIA GPUs and falling barriers to entry
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      • NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL)
    • Data and Memory
      • NVIDIA BlueField Data Processing Units (DPUs)
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      • Model Requirements
      • Calculating GPU memory for serving LLMs
      • Transformer training costs
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    • Libraries and Complements
      • NVIDIA Base Command
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      • CUDA - NVIDIA GTC 2024 presentation
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    • Vast Data Platform
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      • DASE (Disaggregated and Shared Everything)
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    • Storage
      • WEKA: A High-Performance Storage Solution for AI Workloads
      • Introduction to NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS)
        • GDS cuFile API
      • NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS)
      • Vectors in Memory
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Copyright Continuum Labs - 2023

On this page
  • Related Work
  • Longformer Architecture
  • Autoregressive Language Modeling Experiments
  • Pretraining and Finetuning
  • Conclusion and Future Work

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  1. Training
  2. The Fine Tuning Process
  3. Training Processes

Sliding Window Attention

Iz Beltagy, Matthew E. Peters, and Arman Cohan

PreviousYaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language ModelsNextLongRoPE

Last updated 1 year ago

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This December 2020 paper introduces Sliding Window Attention.

The authors highlight the limitations of the standard Transformer architecture, particularly its inability to process long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to the sequence length.

This limitation makes it computationally infeasible to apply Transformers to tasks involving long documents, such as long document classification, question answering (QA), and coreference resolution. Existing approaches often resort to shortening or chunking the long context, which can result in loss of important cross-chunk information.

To address this limitation, the authors propose Longformer, a modified Transformer architecture with a novel attention mechanism that scales linearly with the sequence length, enabling efficient processing of long documents.

Related Work

The authors discuss prior work on adapting Transformers for long documents, categorising them into two main approaches: a) Left-to-right (ltr) approaches that process documents in chunks moving from left to right. While successful in autoregressive language modelling, these models are unsuitable for tasks that benefit from bidirectional context. b) Sparse attention approaches that avoid computing the full quadratic attention matrix. Longformer falls into this category.

The authors also mention task-specific models developed to circumvent the limitations of pretrained Transformer models like BERT, which typically have a 512 token limit.

These approaches include truncation, chunking, and two-stage retrieval-then-extraction models. However, these methods may suffer from information loss or cascading errors.

Longformer Architecture

The core idea behind Longformer is to replace the full self-attention mechanism in the Transformer with a combination of local and global attention patterns that scale linearly with the sequence length.

Sliding Window Attention: Longformer employs a fixed-size window attention surrounding each token, allowing each token to attend to its local context. Multiple stacked layers of windowed attention result in a large receptive field, enabling the top layers to build representations that incorporate information across the entire input.

Dilated Sliding Window: To further increase the receptive field without increasing computation, the authors propose using a dilated sliding window, similar to dilated CNNs. This allows the model to attend to distant tokens without sacrificing local context.

Global Attention: To capture task-specific global information, Longformer adds "global attention" on a few pre-selected input locations. These locations attend to all tokens across the sequence, and all tokens in the sequence attend to them. The authors use separate linear projections for global attention to provide flexibility in modeling different types of attention.

Autoregressive Language Modeling Experiments

The authors first evaluate Longformer on autoregressive character-level language modeling tasks (text8 and enwik8). They use a combination of sliding window attention and dilated sliding window attention, with varying window sizes across layers. The model is trained using a staged training procedure, gradually increasing the sequence length and window size across multiple phases. Longformer achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in modeling long sequences.

Pretraining and Finetuning

To make Longformer suitable for various downstream tasks, the authors pretrain it using masked language modeling (MLM), starting from the RoBERTa checkpoint. They make minimal changes to support Longformer's attention mechanism and add extra position embeddings to handle longer sequences (up to 4,096 tokens). The new position embeddings are initialized by copying the learned embeddings from RoBERTa.

After pretraining, Longformer is finetuned on various downstream tasks, including question answering (WikiHop, TriviaQA, HotpotQA), coreference resolution (OntoNotes), and document classification (IMDB, Hyperpartisan news detection). Longformer consistently outperforms the RoBERTa baseline, especially on tasks that require long-range context. In some cases, Longformer achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its ability to effectively capture long-range dependencies.

Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED)

The authors propose a variant of Longformer called Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED), which extends the encoder-decoder architecture of the original Transformer for sequence-to-sequence tasks like summarization. LED uses Longformer's efficient local+global attention pattern in the encoder and full self-attention in the decoder. The model is initialized from BART and evaluated on the arXiv summarization dataset, which contains long documents. LED achieves state-of-the-art results on this dataset, outperforming the contemporaneous BigBird model.

Conclusion and Future Work

Longformer demonstrates the effectiveness of combining local and global attention patterns to process long documents efficiently. The model achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including language modeling, question answering, coreference resolution, and summarization. The authors suggest that future work could explore the application of Longformer to other document-level tasks and the integration of Longformer with other efficient Transformer variants.

In summary, the Longformer paper presents a novel attention mechanism that enables Transformers to process long documents efficiently, addressing a significant limitation of the standard self-attention mechanism. The proposed architecture achieves impressive results on a range of benchmarks and has the potential to facilitate the application of Transformers to a wider variety of long-document NLP tasks.

LogoLongformer: The Long-Document TransformerarXiv.org
The paper that inspired Sliding Window Attention
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