Eagle and Finch: RWKV with Matrix-Valued States and Dynamic Recurrence

We present Eagle (RWKV-5) and Finch (RWKV-6), sequence models improving upon the RWKV (RWKV-4) architecture. Our architectural design advancements include multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic recurrence mechanism that improve expressivity while maintaining the inference efficiency characteristics of RNNs. We introduce a new multilingual corpus with 1.12 trillion tokens and a fast tokenizer based on greedy matching for enhanced multilinguality. We trained four Eagle models, ranging from 0.46 to 7.5 billion parameters, and two Finch models with 1.6 and 3.1 billion parameters and find that they achieve competitive performance across a wide variety of benchmarks. We release all our models on HuggingFace under the Apache 2.0 license. Models at: https://huggingface.co/RWKV Training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM Inference code at: https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV Time-parallel training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer

RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era

Transformers have revolutionized almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks but suffer from memory and computational complexity that scales quadratically with sequence length. In contrast, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit linear scaling in memory and computational requirements but struggle to match the same performance as Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. We propose a novel model architecture, Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), that combines the efficient parallelizable training of Transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. Our approach leverages a linear attention mechanism and allows us to formulate the model as either a Transformer or an RNN, which parallelizes computations during training and maintains constant computational and memory complexity during inference, leading to the first non-transformer architecture to be scaled to tens of billions of parameters. Our experiments reveal that RWKV performs on par with similarly sized Transformers, suggesting that future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. This work presents a significant step towards reconciling the trade-offs between computational efficiency and model performance in sequence processing tasks.

Improving Graph Property Prediction with Generalized Readout Functions

Graph property prediction is drawing increasing attention in the recent years due to the fact that graphs are one of the most general data structures since they can contain an arbitrary number of nodes and connections between them, and it is the backbone for many different tasks like classification and regression on such kind of data (networks, molecules, knowledge bases, ...). We introduce a novel generalized global pooling layer to mitigate the information loss that typically occurs at the Readout phase in Message-Passing Neural Networks. This novel layer is parametrized by two values ($\beta$ and $p$) which can optionally be learned, and the transformation it performs can revert to several already popular readout functions (mean, max and sum) under certain settings, which can be specified. To showcase the superior expressiveness and performance of this novel technique, we test it in a popular graph property prediction task by taking the current best-performing architecture and using our readout layer as a drop-in replacement and we report new state of the art results. The code to reproduce the experiments can be accessed here: https://github.com/EricAlcaide/generalized-readout-phase

E-swish: Adjusting Activations to Different Network Depths

Activation functions have a notorious impact on neural networks on both training and testing the models against the desired problem. Currently, the most used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). This paper introduces a new and novel activation function, closely related with the new activation $Swish = x * sigmoid(x)$ (Ramachandran et al., 2017) which generalizes it. We call the new activation $E-swish = \beta x * sigmoid(x)$. We show that E-swish outperforms many other well-known activations including both ReLU and Swish. For example, using E-swish provided 1.5% and 4.6% accuracy improvements on Cifar10 and Cifar100 respectively for the WRN 10-2 when compared to ReLU and 0.35% and 0.6% respectively when compared to Swish. The code to reproduce all our experiments can be found at https://github.com/EricAlcaide/E-swish