  Transformers have emerged as the cornerstone of state-of-the-art natural
language processing models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide
range of AI applications. However, the memory demands posed by the
self-attention mechanism and the large feedforward network in Transformers
limit their ability to handle long sequences, thereby creating challenges for
tasks involving multiple long sequences or long-term dependencies. We present a
distinct approach, Blockwise Parallel Transformer (BPT), that leverages
blockwise computation of self-attention and feedforward network fusion to
minimize memory costs. By processing longer input sequences while maintaining
memory efficiency, BPT enables training sequences 32 times longer than vanilla
Transformers and up to 4 times longer than previous memory-efficient methods.
Extensive experiments on language modeling and reinforcement learning tasks
demonstrate the effectiveness of BPT in reducing memory requirements and
improving performance.
