Predictor-Corrector Enhanced Transformers with Exponential Moving Average Coefficient Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a predictor-corrector framework with exponential moving average coefficient learning to improve Transformer models, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple NLP benchmarks with fewer parameters.

Contribution

The work presents a novel predictor-corrector learning scheme combined with EMA-based coefficient learning to enhance Transformer accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

Achieved BLEU scores of 30.95 and 44.27 on WMT'14 English-German and French tasks.

Surpassed a 3.8B DeepNet by 2.9 BLEU points using only one-third of the parameters.

Outperformed LLama models by 5.7 points on the LM Harness Evaluation.

Abstract

Residual networks, as discrete approximations of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), have inspired significant advancements in neural network design, including multistep methods, high-order methods, and multi-particle dynamical systems. The precision of the solution to ODEs significantly affects parameter optimization, thereby impacting model performance. In this work, we present a series of advanced explorations of Transformer architecture design to minimize the error compared to the true ``solution.'' First, we introduce a predictor-corrector learning framework to minimize truncation errors, which consists of a high-order predictor and a multistep corrector. Second, we propose an exponential moving average-based coefficient learning method to strengthen our higher-order predictor. Extensive experiments on large-scale machine translation, abstractive summarization, language modeling, and natural language understanding benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach. On the WMT'14 English-German and English-French tasks, our model achieved BLEU scores of 30.95 and 44.27, respectively. Furthermore, on the OPUS multilingual machine translation task, our model surpasses a robust 3.8B DeepNet by an average of 2.9 SacreBLEU, using only 1/3 parameters. Notably, it also beats LLama models by 5.7 accuracy points on the LM Harness Evaluation.