Yu Yu

Aurko Roy, Rohan Anil, Guangda Lai et al. · deepmind

Transformer models have recently emerged as one of the foundational models in natural language processing, and as a byproduct, there is significant recent interest and investment in scaling these models. However, the training and inference costs of these large Transformer language models are prohibitive, thus necessitating more research in identifying more efficient variants. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective modification to the Transformer architecture inspired by the literature in statistical language modeling, by augmenting the model with n-grams that are constructed from a discrete latent representation of the text sequence. We evaluate our model, the N-Grammer on language modeling on the C4 data-set as well as text classification on the SuperGLUE data-set, and find that it outperforms several strong baselines such as the Transformer and the Primer. We open-source our model for reproducibility purposes in Jax.

Yidan Wu, Yu Yu, Jianan Zhang et al.

We consider the traffic control problem of dynamic routing over parallel servers, which arises in a variety of engineering systems such as transportation and data transmission. We propose a semi-gradient, on-policy algorithm that learns an approximate optimal routing policy. The algorithm uses generic basis functions with flexible weights to approximate the value function across the unbounded state space. Consequently, the training process lacks Lipschitz continuity of the gradient, boundedness of the temporal-difference error, and a prior guarantee on ergodicity, which are the standard prerequisites in existing literature on reinforcement learning theory. To address this, we combine a Lyapunov approach and an ordinary differential equation-based method to jointly characterize the behavior of traffic state and approximation weights. Our theoretical analysis proves that the training scheme guarantees traffic state stability and ensures almost surely convergence of the weights to the approximate optimum. We also demonstrate via simulations that our algorithm attains significantly faster convergence than neural network-based methods with an insignificant approximation error.