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Gemini - A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models: Model Architecture

by Writings, Papers and Blogs on Text ModelsDecember 24th, 2023

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This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks — notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

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Multimodal Models: Model Architecture

This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.

Authors: Gemini Team, Google.

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Model Architecture

Training Infrastructure

Training Dataset

Evaluation

Responsible Deployment

Discussion and Conclusion, References

Contributions and Acknowledgments

Appendix

2. Model Architecture

Gemini models build on top of Transformer decoders (Vaswani et al., 2017) that are enhanced with improvements in architecture and model optimization to enable stable training at scale and optimized inference on Google’s Tensor Processing Units. They are trained to support 32k context length, employing efficient attention mechanisms (for e.g. multi-query attention (Shazeer, 2019)). Our first version, Gemini 1.0, comprises three main sizes to support a wide range of applications as discussed in Table 1.

Gemini models are trained to accommodate textual input interleaved with a wide variety of audio and visual inputs, such as natural images, charts, screenshots, PDFs, and videos, and they can produce text and image outputs (see Figure 2). The visual encoding of Gemini models is inspired by our own foundational work on Flamingo (Alayrac et al., 2022), CoCa (Yu et al., 2022a), and PaLI (Chen et al., 2022), with the important distinction that the models are multimodal from the beginning and can natively output images using discrete image tokens (Ramesh et al., 2021; Yu et al., 2022b).

Video understanding is accomplished by encoding the video as a sequence of frames in the large context window. Video frames or images can be interleaved naturally with text or audio as part of the model input. The models can handle variable input resolution in order to spend more compute on tasks that require fine-grained understanding. In addition, Gemini can directly ingest audio signals at 16kHz from Universal Speech Model (USM) (Zhang et al., 2023) features. This enables the model to capture nuances that are typically lost when the audio is naively mapped to a text input (for example, see audio understanding demo on the website).

Training the Gemini family of models required innovations in training algorithms, dataset, and infrastructure. For the Pro model, the inherent scalability of our infrastructure and learning algorithms enable us to complete pretraining in a matter of weeks, leveraging a fraction of the Ultra’s resources. The Nano series of models leverage additional advancements in distillation and training algorithms to produce the best-in-class small language models for a wide variety of tasks, such as summarization and reading comprehension, which power our next generation on-device experiences.