Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models

Xin Dong, Yonggan Fu, Shizhe Diao, Wonmin Byeon, Zijia Chen, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Shih-Yang Liu, matthijs van keirsbilck, Min-Hung Chen, Yoshi Suhara, Yingyan Lin, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models: 50 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #4 of 15 papers on 2024-11-22. Day-by-day upvote history.

We propose Hymba, a family of small language models featuring a hybrid-head parallel architecture that integrates transformer attention mechanisms with state space models (SSMs) for enhanced efficiency. Attention heads provide high-resolution recall, while SSM heads enable efficient context summarization. Additionally, we introduce learnable meta tokens that are prepended to prompts, storing critical information and alleviating the "forced-to-attend" burden associated with attention mechanisms. This model is further optimized by incorporating cross-layer key-value (KV) sharing and partial sliding window attention, resulting in a compact cache size. During development, we conducted a controlled study comparing various architectures under identical settings and observed significant advantages of our proposed architecture. Notably, Hymba achieves state-of-the-art results for small LMs: Our Hymba-1.5B-Base model surpasses all sub-2B public models in performance and even outperforms Llama-3.2-3B with 1.32% higher average accuracy, an 11.67x cache size reduction, and 3.49x throughput.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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