Revisiting Transformers through the Lens of Low Entropy and Dynamic Sparsity

Abstract

Compression has been a critical lens to understand the success of Transformers. In the past, we have typically taken the target distribution as a criterion to evaluate a model's compression performance. Nevertheless,it often remains challenging to precisely assess how well the model achieves compression and to compare the information content of the learned distribution with that of the target distribution during compression,as the target distribution is typically unknown and entropy computation often incurs exponential cost. In this work, we explore these issues under a controlled experimental setup. We find that Transformers exhibit a unique inductive bias in data compression: beyond approaching the target distribution, they tend to favor learning lower-entropy distributions, with this tendency becoming more pronounced as the model size increases. This preference prevents Transformers from perfectly aligning with the target distribution, instead further compressing its information content. Furthermore, we show that the FFN module plays a critical role in driving this bias. In addition, while models remove informational redundancy from data during compression, they also exhibit redundancy within their parameters, which enables compression and can be characterized through dynamic sparsity. However, the dynamic sparsity patterns in Transformers, particularly in attention and FFN modules, demand further exploration. As for this, we show that larger Transformers show stronger preferences for bypassing attention computations via residual connections and have lower proportion of active neurons. Interestingly, we also find that training instability in larger models strongly correlates with sudden increases in dead neurons. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of Transformers from the lens of entropy and dynamic sparsity.