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Approximating Two-Layer Feedforward Networks for Efficient Transformers

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arxiv 2310.10837 v3 pith:JPKXLFDR submitted 2023-10-16 cs.LG cs.NE

Approximating Two-Layer Feedforward Networks for Efficient Transformers

classification cs.LG cs.NE
keywords moesconditiondenseefficientfeedforwardframeworklargemethods
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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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.

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Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Sparse Layers are Critical to Scaling Looped Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Looped MoE models scale better than standard transformers because different experts activate on each loop pass, recovering expressivity without extra parameters, and support superior early exits.

  2. Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Applying a head-specific sigmoid gate after SDPA in LLMs boosts performance and stability by adding non-linearity and query-dependent sparse modulation while reducing attention sinks.

  3. Sparse Layers are Critical to Scaling Looped Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Looped-MoE models scale better than dense looped or standard transformers because routing changes across loops, and they enable stronger compute-quality trade-offs via early exits at loop boundaries.

  4. UltraMemV2: Memory Networks Scaling to 120B Parameters with Superior Long-Context Learning

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 4.0

    A redesigned memory-layer architecture with five engineering improvements reaches performance parity with 8-expert MoE at similar compute, with lower memory access and stronger long-context memorization.