The ELI5 of the paper is that most "unlearning" methods can be regarded as adding some delta `w` to the parameters of the network, but most of `w` just gets "rounded away" during quantization (i.e. `quantize(X+w) ~= quantize(X)`). Pretty clever idea as a lot of cited methods explicitly optimize/regularize to keep `w` small to avoid degrading evaluation accuracy.
To your point, it does put into question the idea of whether these methods can actually be considered truly "unlearning" from an information-theoretic perspective (or if it is the equivalent of e.g. just putting `if (false)` around the still latent knowledge)
It’s probably more. Pretty conservatively, if the KV embedding dimension for each token is ~10K x 100 attention layers (this is roughly the scale of Llama3.1 405B) that’s already 1M 16-bit floats per token = 2MB. They have likely needed to implement some kind of KV compression (like DeepSeek) to make this even feasible.
Yes. But also note that the new function calling is actually “tool calling” where the model is also fine-tuned to expect and react to the output of the function (and there are various other nuances like being able to call multiple functions in parallel and matching up the outputs to function calls precisely).
When used in multi-turn “call/response” mode it actually does start to unlock some new capabilities.
Not the author, but really nice that they shared some real data points:
> Once our Text-to-SQL solution was in production, we were also able to observe how users interacted with the system. As our implementation improved and as users became more familiar with the feature, our first-shot acceptance rate for the generated SQL increased from 20% to above 40%. In practice, most queries that are generated require multiple iterations of human or AI generation before being finalized. In order to determine how Text-to-SQL affected data user productivity, the most reliable method would have been to experiment. Using such a method, previous research has found that AI assistance improved task completion speed by over 50%. In our real world data (which importantly does not control for differences in tasks), we find a 35% improvement in task completion speed for writing SQL queries using AI assistance.
If you think about it, RAG is a relatively primitive “first pass attention layer” that is binary and semi-heuristic based. I think it’s fairly safe to say that in the long term RAG will be integrated into the model architecture somehow, just a matter of when :)
If sub-quadratic architectures (eg Mamba) become a thing, it will become feasible to precompute most of the work for a fixed prefix (i.e. system prompt) and the latency can be pretty minimal. Even with current transformers, if you have a fixed system prompt, you can save the KV cache and it helps a lot (though the inference time of each incremental token is still linear).
Indeed: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01032.pdf
Perhaps future iterations of SSMs will accommodate dynamically sized (but still non-linearly-growing) hidden states / memories!
“RNN-mode inference” is also extremely exciting because you can precompute the hidden state of any prompt prefix (i.e. a long system prompt, or statically retrieved context) and continued generations pay the same cost irrespective of the prefix length.
Our startup is building https://arcwise.app, which allows you to embed full-fledged SQL tables inside Google Sheets! We’re in the process of building out support for joins & subqueries, would be curious what people think.
$skill-installer playwright-interactive in Codex! the model writes normal JS playwright code in a Node REPL