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arXiv:2302.10866cs.LG

Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models

Michael Poli, Stefano Massaroli, Eric Nguyen, Daniel Y. Fu, Tri Dao, Stephen Baccus, Yoshua Bengio, Stefano Ermon, Christopher Ré

Abstract

Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.

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Additional details
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning cs.CLComputation and Language

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Linked by 8 identifiable commenters in 9 comments across 8 threads, from Mar 2023 to Feb 2025. Found in 4 HN submissions from Mar 2023 to Apr 2023. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments8 threads

    • I see no mention of prior work Hyena Operator which already demonstrated O(n log n) full context mixing several years ago. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10866

      semiinfinitelyView on HNParent context

  1. The Eleuther AI Mafia 1 comment
    • It is important to note the claims are made for similar dataset & params. If you like some independent verification outside eleuther circle. There is microsoft paper on retnet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08621 And the stanford heyena paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10866 Do…

      pico_creatorView on HNParent context

    • I never know if I have an inside scoop or an outside scoop. Has Hyena not addressed the scaling of context length [1]? I know this version is barely a month old but it was shared to me by a non-engineer the week it came out. Still, giving interviews where the person takes away…

      hervatureView on HNParent context

    • Notes from quick read of paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10866. Title of popsci is overreaching, this is a drop-in subquadratic replacement for attention. Could be promising, but to be seen if it is adopted in practice. skybrian…

      saurabh20nView on HNParent context

    • Rumor is RedPajama is going to have upwards of 60k token context by using Hyena: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10866 But it's just a rumor. We'll see.

      MacsHeadroomView on HNParent context

  2. From deep to long learning? 2 comments
    • Oddly enough, I was reading their paper just last night: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.10866.pdf I think we're going to see a lot more in the wavelet/convolution/fft space when thinking about how to increase context length. I think there's also a lot of room for innovation in the…

      jmoleView on HNParent context

    • Other approaches for long sequence lengths: - "Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.10866.pdf - "Resurrecting Recurrent Neural Networks for Long Sequences" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.06349.pdf It's unclear (at least to me) if…

      smaddoxView on HNParent context

    • Sounds interesting. Another recent paper on efficient architecture for long context lengths: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10866

      smaddoxView on HNParent context

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