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Attention Is Off By One

evanmiller.org

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Re: Attention Is Off By One

#241

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

gromneer wrote: post #230
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either your example is too trivial to justify your point, or the point itself is trivial. It's right for an academic to distance themselves from the subject of their study because we do need researchers who try not to be biased. If they fail that and then correct themselves, then what's the problem? Complaining about inconsequential uses of tone is obsessing about form over function and reeks too much of insecurity,…

They aren't magically "objective" because they used the passive voice. It's a performance.

Of course language does not guarantee that the study is objective—that would be in the design of the experiment, the reproducibility of results, and the absence of conflicts of interest among the researchers. Using the passive voice however elevates the outcomes being reported as facts that actually happened, instead of mere personal experiences.

People complain all the time about news being biased for being told from a reporter’s point of view, but complain all the same when events are reported in an encyclopedic manner as researchers do when they remove themselves from the events and the outcomes of their studies.

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#242

Post by projectileboy »

doliveira wrote: post #30
mlsu wrote: post #8

I don't really understand the subject matter enough, so I apologize in advance for the meta-comment... The author mentions that he would maybe have written this as a scientific paper: > I tried writing a serious-looking research paper about the bug and my proposed fix, but I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex, so I figured I’d just write a blog post instead. (History is written by the winne…

Nah, scientific papers are supposed to be precise and technical. This reads like those quite frequent suggestions here of switching all equations in papers to plain English or code: it honestly comes from a place of ignorance, and I say that as basically a layman myself. What should be encouraged is for academics to blog about their research as well. It would even help when recruiting and onboarding new members. Righ…

Strongly agree. “Why are academic papers always written in such mumbo jumbo?” is the same complaint as “Why are contracts written in such legalese?”, which is a manifestation of “I’m smart and I don’t get this, so the author is dumb for not writing clearly.” It’s a natural human bias that most HN denizens insist they don’t possess, but of course we do.

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#243

Post by dragonwriter »

dekhn wrote: post #155
coldtea wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague"[39] and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way So you're saying that "Her work is basically handwaving and bullshitting".

Yes, but also, wrapping the handwaving and bullshitting in a layer of obfuscation: "Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a faccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open feld. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of bo…

> (donna was woke before woke was a thing)

Donna Haraway was born 6 years after “stay woke” in its sense as an admonition to maintain alertness to the racist context was coined. Leaving aside a debate over whether her work is a good match for “woke”, she very much cannot have been woke before woke was a thing. (Before its recent replacement of “politically correct” as the American Right’s preferred, meaning-stripped, label for everything it disagrees with, sure, but “woke” was a thing long before that.)

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#244

Post by tonypace »

RationPhantoms wrote: post #216
smallnamespace wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Papers are mostly read by other researchers, where the added background is actively bad because it obscures the real meat of the paper to the main audience. If you just wanted a digestible intro then you would usually buy a textbook. I think the argument that every research paper ought to be a mashup of a textbook + the actual research to be a bit silly from a “people should specialize at what they’re good at” standp…

I've long wanted an informational slider to bits of text. Something where you can zoom in and out to the level of desired complexity. LLM's might be able to fill in some of those gaps. You could turn any paper into a introduction of the subject it's a part of.

This sounds like a good use case for local llm models. Browser plugin, precooked prompts for different levels of detail, maybe a lora to give the model some idea of expected output. I bet some of the 13b models could do a useful job on this even if they were imperfect.

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#245

Post by chefandy »

cratermoon wrote: post #117
r3trohack3r wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it mea…

I believe Feynman understood that he was oversimplifying, and I believe he was able to do because his reason for reading the paper was not the same as the reason another sociologist might have. Thus a sentence like, "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels", does, to a non-expert, mean "people read", but to another sociologist of a researcher in relat…

Visual symbols could be anything from written words to police uniforms. It's not oversimplifying— it's flat-out wrong. It would be like reading

Expressions representing numbers may be combined with an expression representing a primitive procedure (such as + or *) to form a compound expression that represents the application of the procedure to those numbers.

And an English professor haughtily responding, "you know what that means? 'Computers compute!' This SICP book is just a pile of jargon that could be dramatically simplified!"

His dismissal revealed nothing about the topic, but a whole lot about how so many in the "hard" sciences view others. Don't understand the text? It's the text's fault! For I am a real scientist, and if I don't understand it, it's not understandable!

He might have been a genius, but he should have stuck to subatomic particles and left exploring human behavior up to the people who'd done the prerequisite reading.

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#246

Post by sudosysgen »

AlanSE wrote: post #240
nazgul17 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I understood it, the author is saying that, with this change, big values disappear, and we can then use fewer bits to encode the output of transformers, which means reducing the memory requirements of the network. Memory being the limiting factor to running models large, this would be a big deal.

Yeah, good to bring it back to the original point. Reading the article felt exciting, but in hindsight I am now missing a key detail. The equations all seem to be matrix operations with a fixed number of rows / columns (you can take me as a real layman here). Unless you change that, I don't understand _how_ you can reduce memory needs. Granted, I'm probably putting my foot in my mouth not understanding transformers.

You can reduce the number of bits per float (scalar).

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#247

Post by jablongo »

AlanSE wrote: post #240
nazgul17 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I understood it, the author is saying that, with this change, big values disappear, and we can then use fewer bits to encode the output of transformers, which means reducing the memory requirements of the network. Memory being the limiting factor to running models large, this would be a big deal.

Yeah, good to bring it back to the original point. Reading the article felt exciting, but in hindsight I am now missing a key detail. The equations all seem to be matrix operations with a fixed number of rows / columns (you can take me as a real layman here). Unless you change that, I don't understand _how_ you can reduce memory needs. Granted, I'm probably putting my foot in my mouth not understanding transformers.

It has to do with the precision of the values stored in those rows and columns. If they could be coerced into a narrower range (without losing information) then we could effectively store them each with 8 bits or something. The +1 prevents blowups when the denominator in its current form approaches 0, and without those blowups, then we can use less bits, in theory.

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#248

Post by worthless-trash »

janalsncm wrote: post #102
nico wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be amazing if academia started replacing papers with videos + code I want to see: an explainer of the science/ideas/experiments/hipothesis And instructions on how to reproduce the experiments/results Some YouTubers are going in this direction

+1 to including code with your paper. It improves reproducibility and transparency. There’s even a well-known website dedicated to this purpose. For the rest of it I don’t care. As long as researchers understand what’s going on, that’s what matters.

I'm not an academic, but some of the notation and terminology they use makes me want to hunt them down and 'clockwork orange their eyes open' until they can show me how their math is "intended" to work.

Inconsistent math notatation in papers along with vague terms in descriptions makes me so mad.

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#249

Post by [deleted] »

sedael wrote: post #62
fwlr wrote: post #24

The author identifies a real problem and poses a simple solution. It passes all my crank tests (why did no one come up with this before? Because the author is intimately familiar with the softmax function from work outside of ML, and plausibly nobody who’s investigating these issues is remotely as familiar, so despite researchers narrowing the issue down to “something to do with softmax”, they don’t have a deep enoug…

>why did no one come up with this before So it turns out someone did. Specifically google did. This exact same idea has been in flaxformers since at least November 2021. https://github.com/google/flaxformer/blame/ee62754ebe5a5eeb1... Specifically to save people a click it says: > """Softmax function with an additional virtual logit equal to zero. For compatibility with some previously trained models. This is equivale…

[deleted]

Re: Attention Is Off By One

#250

Post by johntiger1 »

dsubburam wrote: post #164

This part of his post where he explains vector embeddings of the input/output tokens just looks wrong to me: >This vector seems to get taller every model year, for example the recent LLaMA 2 model from Meta uses an embedding vector of length 3,204, which works out to 6KB+ in half-precision floating-point, just to represent one word in the vocabulary, which typically contains 30,000 - 50,000 entries. >Now if you’re a…

Yep the author is completely wrong on point one:

>This vector seems to get taller every model year, for example the recent LLaMA 2 model from Meta uses an embedding vector of length 3,204, which works out to 6KB+ in half-precision floating-point, just to represent one word in the vocabulary, which typically contains 30,000 - 50,000 entries.

>Now if you’re a memory-miserly C programmer like me, you might wonder, why in the world are these AI goobers using 6KB to represent something that ought to take, like 2 bytes tops? If their vocabulary is less than 2^16=65,384, we only need 16 bits to represent an entry, yeah?

The reason we have 3204 2B allocations is that each of the 2B contains info (latent space dimension). If you go to just the 2B representation, it is effectively one hot encoding which completely defeats the purpose of word embedding

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