Convergent Stochastic Training of Attention and Understanding LoRA

Keywords: attention, LoRA, stochastic optimization, isoperimetric inequality

Abstract: Transformers have revolutionized machine learning and deploying attention layers in the model is increasingly standard across a myriad of applications. Further, for large models, it is common to implement Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), whereby a factorized parameterization of them is trained, to achieve a surprisingly beneficial accuracy-size trade-off. In this work, via a unified framework we rigorously establish trainability of such models under stochastic methods. We prove that for any mild regularization, the empirical regression loss on a attention layer and LoRA on a shallow neural net, both induce Poincare inequality for the corresponding Gibbs' measure. Then it follows via invoking recent results that a certain SDE, which mimics the SGD, minimizes the corresponding losses. In both the cases, our first-of-its-kind results of trainability on attention and nets, do not rely on any assumptions on the data or the size of the architecture.

Submission Number: 17