Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models

[arxiv]  [code]  [HF models]  [blog] 

Abstract

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.

@misc{dong2024hymbahybridheadarchitecturesmall,
      title={Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models}, 
      author={Xin Dong and Yonggan Fu and Shizhe Diao and Wonmin Byeon and Zijia Chen and Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar and Shih-Yang Liu and Matthijs Van Keirsbilck and Min-Hung Chen and Yoshi Suhara and Yingyan Lin and Jan Kautz and Pavlo Molchanov},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2411.13676},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13676}, 
}