IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission6944 Authors

Abstract: High-order numerical methods enhance Transformer performance in tasks like NLP and CV, but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead. Our analysis reveals that conventional efficiency techniques, such as distillation, can be detrimental to the performance of these models, exemplified by PCformer. To explore more optimizable ODE-based Transformer architectures, we propose the Iterative Implicit Euler Transformer (IIET), which simplifies high-order methods using an iterative implicit Euler approach. This simplification not only leads to superior performance but also facilitates model compression compared to PCformer. To enhance inference efficiency, we introduce Iteration Influence-Aware Distillation (IIAD). Through a flexible threshold, IIAD allows users to effectively balance the performance-efficiency trade-off. On lm-evaluation-harness, IIET boosts average accuracy by 2.65\% over vanilla Transformers and 0.8\% over PCformer. Its efficient variant, E-IIET, significantly cuts inference overhead by 60\% while retaining 99. 4\% of the original task accuracy. Moreover, the most efficient IIET variant achieves an average performance gain exceeding 1.6\% over vanilla Transformer with comparable speed.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Language Modeling

Research Area Keywords: ordinary differential equations,language modeling

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Reproduction study, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency, Theory

Languages Studied: English

Keywords: ordinary differential equations, language modeling

Submission Number: 6944