Title
Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer.
Abstract
The capacity of a neural network to absorb information is limited by its number of parameters. Conditional computation, where parts of the network are active on a per-example basis, has been proposed in theory as a way of dramatically increasing model capacity without a proportional increase in computation. In practice, however, there are significant algorithmic and performance challenges. In this work, we address these challenges and finally realize the promise of conditional computation, achieving greater than 1000x improvements in model capacity with only minor losses in computational efficiency on modern GPU clusters. We introduce a Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts layer (MoE), consisting of up to thousands of feed-forward sub-networks. A trainable gating network determines a sparse combination of these experts to use for each example. We apply the MoE to the tasks of language modeling and machine translation, where model capacity is critical for absorbing the vast quantities of knowledge available in the training corpora. We present model architectures in which a MoE with up to 137 billion parameters is applied convolutionally between stacked LSTM layers. On large language modeling and machine translation benchmarks, these models achieve significantly better results than state-of-the-art at lower computational cost.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
ICLR
GPU cluster,Computer science,CUDA,Machine translation,Mixture of experts,Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Artificial neural network,Machine learning,Language model,Computation
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1701.06538
95
PageRank 
References 
Authors
3.02
21
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Noam Shazeer1108943.70
Azalia Mirhoseini223818.68
Krzysztof Maziarz3953.02
A. Davis4159353.13
Quoc V. Le58501366.59
geoffrey e hinton6404354751.69
Jeffrey Dean711804457.69