CG80499 / KAN-GPT-2

Training small GPT-2 style models using Kolmogorov-Arnold networks.

Training small GPT-2 style models using KANs instead of MLPs in JAX

This repository compares transformers using multilayer perceptron (MLP) and Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KAN) layers.

Key points:

• Uses Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks but with Chebyshev polynomials as the basis (inspired by this repo).
• The tanh function is used to keep the activation values within [-1, 1] rather than using grids that update during training.
• Both models are trained on 134M tokens of TinyStories.
• They both use standard GPT-2 architecture (other than the KAN part).
• The MLP version has 3.3M non-embedding weights and the KAN model has 2.5M non-embedding weights (~25% fewer).

Results:

They both achieve a final loss of ~2.46 (despite the KAN model having 25% fewer parameters!).

Hyperparameters:

• d_model: 128
• d_mlp: 768 (when applicable)
• n_heads: 8
• n_layers: 16
• learning_rate: 1e-5
• batch_size: 16
• weight_decay: 0.001
• optimizer: adamw
• seq_len: 64

Hardware: Single 1080ti GPU

Wandb: link.