Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context

In this report, we present the latest model of the Gemini family, Gemini 1.5 Pro, a highly compute-efficient multimodal mixture-of-experts model capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improves the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and matches or surpasses Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5 Pro's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 2.1 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Models

Fine-tuning language models~(LMs) on human-generated data remains a prevalent practice. However, the performance of such models is often limited by the quantity and diversity of high-quality human data. In this paper, we explore whether we can go beyond human data on tasks where we have access to scalar feedback, for example, on math problems where one can verify correctness. To do so, we investigate a simple self-training method based on expectation-maximization, which we call ReST$^{EM}$, where we (1) generate samples from the model and filter them using binary feedback, (2) fine-tune the model on these samples, and (3) repeat this process a few times. Testing on advanced MATH reasoning and APPS coding benchmarks using PaLM-2 models, we find that ReST$^{EM}$ scales favorably with model size and significantly surpasses fine-tuning only on human data. Overall, our findings suggest self-training with feedback can substantially reduce dependence on human-generated data.

Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Convexifying Transformers: Improving optimization and understanding of transformer networks

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism, the literature still lacks a solid analysis of these networks and interpretation of the functions learned by them. To this end, we study the training problem of attention/transformer networks and introduce a novel convex analytic approach to improve the understanding and optimization of these networks. Particularly, we first introduce a convex alternative to the self-attention mechanism and reformulate the regularized training problem of transformer networks with our alternative convex attention. Then, we cast the reformulation as a convex optimization problem that is interpretable and easier to optimize. Moreover, as a byproduct of our convex analysis, we reveal an implicit regularization mechanism, which promotes sparsity across tokens. Therefore, we not only improve the optimization of attention/transformer networks but also provide a solid theoretical understanding of the functions learned by them. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our theory through several numerical experiments.

Layer-Stack Temperature Scaling

Recent works demonstrate that early layers in a neural network contain useful information for prediction. Inspired by this, we show that extending temperature scaling across all layers improves both calibration and accuracy. We call this procedure "layer-stack temperature scaling" (LATES). Informally, LATES grants each layer a weighted vote during inference. We evaluate it on five popular convolutional neural network architectures both in- and out-of-distribution and observe a consistent improvement over temperature scaling in terms of accuracy, calibration, and AUC. All conclusions are supported by comprehensive statistical analyses. Since LATES neither retrains the architecture nor introduces many more parameters, its advantages can be reaped without requiring additional data beyond what is used in temperature scaling. Finally, we show that combining LATES with Monte Carlo Dropout matches state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10/100.

REPAIR: REnormalizing Permuted Activations for Interpolation Repair

In this paper we look into the conjecture of Entezari et al.(2021) which states that if the permutation invariance of neural networks is taken into account, then there is likely no loss barrier to the linear interpolation between SGD solutions. First, we observe that neuron alignment methods alone are insufficient to establish low-barrier linear connectivity between SGD solutions due to a phenomenon we call variance collapse: interpolated deep networks suffer a collapse in the variance of their activations, causing poor performance. Next, we propose REPAIR (REnormalizing Permuted Activations for Interpolation Repair) which mitigates variance collapse by rescaling the preactivations of such interpolated networks. We explore the interaction between our method and the choice of normalization layer, network width, and depth, and demonstrate that using REPAIR on top of neuron alignment methods leads to 60%-100% relative barrier reduction across a wide variety of architecture families and tasks. In particular, we report a 74% barrier reduction for ResNet50 on ImageNet and 90% barrier reduction for ResNet18 on CIFAR10.

Teaching Algorithmic Reasoning via In-context Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing in-context learning capabilities through scaling up model and data size. Despite this progress, LLMs are still unable to solve algorithmic reasoning problems. While providing a rationale with the final answer has led to further improvements in multi-step reasoning problems, Anil et al. 2022 showed that even simple algorithmic reasoning tasks such as parity are far from solved. In this work, we identify and study four key stages for successfully teaching algorithmic reasoning to LLMs: (1) formulating algorithms as skills, (2) teaching multiple skills simultaneously (skill accumulation), (3) teaching how to combine skills (skill composition) and (4) teaching how to use skills as tools. We show that it is possible to teach algorithmic reasoning to LLMs via in-context learning, which we refer to as algorithmic prompting. We evaluate our approach on a variety of arithmetic and quantitative reasoning tasks, and demonstrate significant boosts in performance over existing prompting techniques. In particular, for long parity, addition, multiplication and subtraction, we achieve an error reduction of approximately 10x, 9x, 5x and 2x respectively compared to the best available baselines.

Revisiting Neural Scaling Laws in Language and Vision

The remarkable progress in deep learning in recent years is largely driven by improvements in scale, where bigger models are trained on larger datasets for longer schedules. To predict the benefit of scale empirically, we argue for a more rigorous methodology based on the extrapolation loss, instead of reporting the best-fitting (interpolating) parameters. We then present a recipe for estimating scaling law parameters reliably from learning curves. We demonstrate that it extrapolates more accurately than previous methods in a wide range of architecture families across several domains, including image classification, neural machine translation (NMT) and language modeling, in addition to tasks from the BIG-Bench evaluation benchmark. Finally, we release a benchmark dataset comprising of 90 evaluation tasks to facilitate research in this domain.

Exploring Length Generalization in Large Language Models

The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These include theorem proving, solving quantitative mathematics problems, and reading/summarizing novels. In this paper, we run careful empirical studies exploring the length generalization capabilities of transformer-based language models. We first establish that naively finetuning transformers on length generalization tasks shows significant generalization deficiencies independent of model scale. We then show that combining pretrained large language models' in-context learning abilities with scratchpad prompting (asking the model to output solution steps before producing an answer) results in a dramatic improvement in length generalization. We run careful failure analyses on each of the learning modalities and identify common sources of mistakes that highlight opportunities in equipping language models with the ability to generalize to longer problems.

Long Range Language Modeling via Gated State Spaces

State space models have shown to be effective at modeling long range dependencies, specially on sequence classification tasks. In this work we focus on autoregressive sequence modeling over English books, Github source code and ArXiv mathematics articles. Based on recent developments around the effectiveness of gated activation functions, we propose a new layer named Gated State Space (GSS) and show that it trains significantly faster than the diagonal version of S4 (i.e. DSS) on TPUs, is fairly competitive with several well-tuned Transformer-based baselines and exhibits zero-shot generalization to longer inputs while being straightforward to implement. Finally, we show that leveraging self-attention to model local dependencies improves the performance of GSS even further.