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pico_creator | 1 year ago

Hey there, im Eugene / PicoCreator - co-leading the RWKV project - feel free to AMA =)

discuss

order

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe|1 year ago

I noticed the lack of support from ollama and llama.cpp for RWKV. As those are (to my eyes) very strong drivers of experimentation (i.e. supporting them means vastly more outreach) I was considering whether you were considering taking this into your own hands by contributing code to them? Or rather is the fact that you are not (AFAIK) doing it because you lack the bandwidth in terms of man power or any other reason?

nickpsecurity|1 year ago

It’s really, interesting work. I’m glad you’ve kept at it. I’d like to ask you about two issues.

I keep seeing papers like “Repeat After Me” claiming serious weaknesses of state space vs transformer models. What are the current weaknesses of RWKV vs transformers? Have you mitigated them? If so, how?

The other issue is that file sharing being illegal, Wikipedia requiring derivatives to be copyleft, etc means I can’t train models with most data legally. Pre-1920’s works in Project Gutenberg are totally public domain. Both the model and the training data would be 100% legal for reproducible research. Would your team be willing to train a 3B-7B model on only Gutenberg and release it to the public domain?

(Note: The Stack without GitHub Issues can be used for permissive code. However, there could be contamination issues like incorrect licenses, PII, etc. So, maybe at least one, 100% legal model. Maybe a second with Gutenberg and The Stack for coding research.)

Example use of Gutenberg:

https://www.tensorflow.org/datasets/catalog/pg19

anon373839|1 year ago

> The other issue is that file sharing being illegal, Wikipedia requiring derivatives to be copyleft, etc means I can’t train models with most data legally.

That really depends on whether LLM pretraining ends up held as an infringing use. (Of course, it’ll take a while for the cases to work through the courts and for a body of jurisprudence to be developed on this subject.)

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe|1 year ago

Has there been progress towards making RWKV multimodal? Can be use projector layers to send images to RWKV?

pico_creator|1 year ago

There is work done for Vision RWKV, and audio RWKV, an example paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02308

Its the same principle as open transformer models where an adapter is used to generate the embedding

However currently the core team focus is in scaling the core text model, as this would be the key performance driver, before adapting multi-modal.

The tech is there, the base model needs to be better

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe|1 year ago

I'm quite interested in repeng [0] (representztion engineering) for steerability of (so fzr transformer based) LLMs and was wondering if anyone had tried such methods on rwkv (or mamba for that matter). Maybe there are some low hanging fruits about it.

[0] https://github.com/vgel/repeng/issues

pico_creator|1 year ago

One of the interesting "new direction" for RWKV and Mamba (or any recurrent model), is the monitoring and manipulation of the state in between token. For steerability, alignment, etc =)

Not saying its a good or bad idea, but pointing out that having a fixed state in between has interesting applications in this space

low_tech_punk|1 year ago

Thanks! The 0.1B version looks perfect for embedded system. What is the key benefit of attention-free architecture?

pico_creator|1 year ago

lower compute cost especially over longer sequence length. Depending on context length, its 10x, 100x, or even 1000x+ cheaper. (quadratic vs linear cost difference)

bratao|1 year ago

What would be the most performant way to run a inference using RWKV? Do you have and speed comparison to a similar sized transformer?

I have a task(OCR cleaning) that I´m evaluating faster options and look like RWKV would be a nice alternative.

littlestymaar|1 year ago

Has there been any plans to build a “reasoning” llm using RWKV? With the increase in inference token count caused by such methods, the muhc lower footprint of recurrent architecture could really make a difference for such a use-case.

jharohit|1 year ago

congrats and great work on RWKV and Recursal.ai