Title
Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers
Abstract
Transformers are powerful sequence models, but require time and memory that grows quadratically with the sequence length. In this paper we introduce sparse factorizations of the attention matrix which reduce this to $O(n sqrt{n})$. We also introduce a) a variation on architecture and initialization to train deeper networks, b) the recomputation of attention matrices to save memory, and c) fast attention kernels for training. We call networks with these changes Sparse Transformers, and show they can model sequences tens of thousands of timesteps long using hundreds of layers. We use the same architecture to model images, audio, and text from raw bytes, setting a new state of the art for density modeling of Enwik8, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet-64. We generate unconditional samples that demonstrate global coherence and great diversity, and show it is possible in principle to use self-attention to model sequences of length one million or more.
Year
Venue
DocType
2019
arXiv: Learning
Journal
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.65
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rewon Child1383.79
scott gray2452.12
alec radford3216575.60
Ilya Sutskever4258141120.24