arXiv AI

Emergent Inverse-Depth Scaling From Nonlinearity In Attention

The paper investigates how nonlinearity in attention mechanisms affects scaling laws in large language models. It finds that nonlinear attention leads to an inverse-depth decay of loss across various data spectra, enabling models to learn both strong and weak spectral directions simultaneously. This behavior contrasts with linear-attention models, which rely on a power-law data spectrum and learn directions sequentially.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Critical attention scaling in long-context transformers

arXiv:2510. 05554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models scale to longer contexts, attention layers suffer from a fundamental pathology: attention scores collapse toward uniformity as context length $n$ increases, causing tokens to cluster excessively, a phenomenon known as rank-collapse.

By Shi Chen, Zhengjiang Lin, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Emergent Capabilities Arise Randomly from Learning Sparse Attention Patterns

arXiv:2606. 25010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural scaling laws for transformer language models predict smooth improvements in pretraining loss with increasing parameters, but downstream capabilities such as in-context learning are known to emerge abruptly past a certain model scale.

By Vatsal Baherwani, Zixi Chen, Shikai Qiu, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Pavel Izmailov