NoiseFormer -- Noise Diffused Symmetric Attention Transformer

Abstract

Transformer architecture has been very successful long runner in the field of Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLM) because of its powerful attention-based learning and parallel-natured architecture. As the models grow gigantic in terms of memory footprint, difficulties in fitting the model on a device like a GPU or an AI accelerator give rise to the need for multiple computing devices thereby escalating the computing cost. This increased training/inference cost paved the way for efficient model size reduction/parametric reduction deploying Sparse Attention techniques. In this paper, we start analyzing one of the techniques of Sparse Attention called Symmetric Dot-Product Attention (referred to as Symmetric Attention) and propose a novel unified model architecture called Noise Diffused Symmetric Attention Transformer to enhance the model's performance. While maintaining the memory gains of Symmetric Attention, with minute overhead in terms of model parameters and computational overhead, the proposed model brings in enhanced performance in terms of accuracy and inference-time sampling. The proposed model is validated upon GPT2 base model and the results reflect the performance gains falling between plain Symmetric attention and GPT2 base model on a variety of GLUE benchmark tasks in terms of accuracy, with significant model size reduction with respect to the base model.