Retentive Networks: A Game Changer for Language Models

✨Retentive Networks offer lower latency, higher throughput, and better scalability than Transformers.

🔥Retentive Networks achieve training parallelism and low-cost inference by making computations linear.

🧠Retentive Networks combine the advantages of both Transformers and recurrent networks.

💡Retentive Networks eliminate the need for the softmax operation, enabling parallel computations.

🚀Retentive Networks show promising results in experiments, but further research is needed to evaluate their full potential.

What are Retentive Networks?

—Retentive Networks are a new architecture for large language models that aim to achieve training parallelism, low-cost inference, and good performance.

How do Retentive Networks differ from Transformers?

—Retentive Networks offer lower latency, higher throughput, and better scalability due to their linear computations, while Transformers use attention mechanisms that require quadratic memory usage.

Why are Retentive Networks attractive?

—Retentive Networks provide the benefits of both Transformers and recurrent networks by combining parallel computations and recurrent-like memory accumulation.

How do Retentive Networks achieve training parallelism?

—Retentive Networks eliminate the softmax operation, allowing for parallel computations and training with multiple tokens at once.

Have Retentive Networks been thoroughly evaluated?

—While Retentive Networks show promising results in experiments conducted by Microsoft Research, further research is needed to fully assess their potential and any potential trade-offs.

00:00Introduction to Retentive Networks and overview of their benefits.

03:40Comparison of Retentive Networks with Transformers, highlighting their advantages in terms of latency, throughput, and scalability.

08:15Explanation of how Retentive Networks achieve training parallelism and low-cost inference through linear computations.

12:30Discussion on the advantages of Retentive Networks in combining the benefits of Transformers and recurrent networks.

15:50Explanation of the elimination of the softmax operation in Retentive Networks for parallel computations.

18:20Summary of the current state of research on Retentive Networks and the need for further evaluation and exploration.