Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models

Authors: Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuqing Xia, Jilong Xue, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei

Results of the summarizing process for the arXiv paper: 2307.08621v1

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In their paper titled "Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models," Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuqing Xia, Jilong Xue, Jianyong Wang, and Furu Wei propose a new architecture called Retentive Network (RetNet) as a foundation for large language models. The authors aim to achieve training parallelism, low-cost inference and good performance simultaneously. The researchers start by theoretically deriving the connection between recurrence and attention. They then introduce the retention mechanism for sequence modeling in RetNet. This mechanism supports three computation paradigms: parallel representation; recurrent representation; and chunkwise recurrent representation. The parallel representation allows for training parallelism enabling efficient model training. The recurrent representation enables low-cost $O(1)$ inference improving decoding throughput latency and GPU memory usage without compromising performance. The chunkwise recurrent representation facilitates efficient modeling of long sequences with linear complexity where each chunk is encoded in parallel while summarizing the chunks recursively. Experimental results on language modeling demonstrate that RetNet achieves favorable scaling results in terms of both training and deployment as well as efficient inference with low cost. These intriguing properties position RetNet as a strong successor to the Transformer model for large language models. The authors provide code for implementing RetNet at https://aka.ms/retnet.
AI-generated keywords: Retentive Network Transformer Language Modeling Training Parallelism Low-Cost Inference

AI-generated Key Points

  • Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuqing Xia, Jilong Xue, Jianyong Wang, and Furu Wei propose a new architecture called Retentive Network (RetNet) for large language models.
  • The authors aim to achieve training parallelism, low-cost inference, and good performance simultaneously.
  • The retention mechanism in RetNet supports three computation paradigms: parallel representation, recurrent representation, and chunkwise recurrent representation.
  • Experimental results show that RetNet achieves favorable scaling results in terms of both training and deployment.
  • RetNet enables efficient inference with low cost and improves decoding throughput latency and GPU memory usage without compromising performance.
  • RetNet is positioned as a strong successor to the Transformer model for large language models.
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Abstract: In this work, we propose Retentive Network (RetNet) as a foundation architecture for large language models, simultaneously achieving training parallelism, low-cost inference, and good performance. We theoretically derive the connection between recurrence and attention. Then we propose the retention mechanism for sequence modeling, which supports three computation paradigms, i.e., parallel, recurrent, and chunkwise recurrent. Specifically, the parallel representation allows for training parallelism. The recurrent representation enables low-cost $O(1)$ inference, which improves decoding throughput, latency, and GPU memory without sacrificing performance. The chunkwise recurrent representation facilitates efficient long-sequence modeling with linear complexity, where each chunk is encoded parallelly while recurrently summarizing the chunks. Experimental results on language modeling show that RetNet achieves favorable scaling results, parallel training, low-cost deployment, and efficient inference. The intriguing properties make RetNet a strong successor to Transformer for large language models. Code will be available at https://aka.ms/retnet.

Submitted to arXiv on 17 Jul. 2023

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