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the precision of our person tubelets on the training set is only 21.1%. A major
contributing factor to this is that UCF action annotations are not exhaustive
{ there may be people in the video who are not labelled at all as they are not
performing an annotated action. These people will, however, still be detected by
a COCO-trained detector and considered as false positives during this evaluation.
The fact that we are able to train our model with these annotations demonstrates the ability of our multiple instance learning method to handle label noise
in the training set. The inconsistencies in the UCF101-24 dataset labelling are
detailed further in the supplementary, and has also been noted previously by
Ch eron et al. [6].
Noise in the person detections are not a problem for the training of our
fully-supervised baseline, as it is trained with ground-truth boxes in addition
to predicted boxes. As we have box-level supervision in this case, predicted
detections which have an IoU of more than 0.5 with a ground-truth detection
are assigned the label of the ground-truth box, or the negative label otherwise,
during fully-supervised training.
As the goal of this paper is not to develop a better human detector or tracker
for building the person tubelets, we use the Faster-RCNN detector released


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As the goal of this paper is not to develop a better human detector or tracker
for building the person tubelets, we use the Faster-RCNN detector released
publicly by Ch eron et al. [6] for all our evaluations on the UCF101-24 validation
set. This detector was originally trained on COCO and then netuned on the
UCF101-24 training set using Detectron [13].
The eect of tubelet sampling For the tubelets of length K= 16 that we use,
there is a mean of 33.1 tubelets per video in the UCF101-24 dataset. In computing
this, we only consider tubelets which have a spatio-temporal IoU of less than 0.5
with each other. More tubelets would be obtained if we counted one from each
frame of the video.
As we can t a maximum of 16 tubelets onto a 16GB Nvidia V100 GPU, it
is clear that it is necessary to sample the tubelets in each bag. Note that UCF
videos often have a high number of tubelets, as there are often many people
in the video who are not labelled as performing an action. As described in the
previous subsection, this is also a signicant source of noise.


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in the video who are not labelled as performing an action. As described in the
previous subsection, this is also a signicant source of noise.
Table 2 shows the eect of changing the batch size (number of bags), and the
number of tubelets sampled per bag, such that GPU memory usage is maximised.
We can see that the uncertainty loss helps in all cases and that accuracy decreases
with low batch sizes. We believe this is due to batch normalisation statistics
being too correlated when more tubes are from the same video.
Comparison to state-of-the-art Table 3 compares our results to the state-of-the-art.
The bottom-half of the table shows that we outperform previous weakly-supervised
Uncertainty-Aware Weakly Supervised Action Detection 11
Table 2. The eect of the number of bags in each training batch on accuracy (Video
AP at 0.5). The uncertainty loss improves accuracy in all scenarios. Although fewer, but
larger, bags can reduce the noise due to sampling, they also cause batch normalisation
statistics to be too correlated, reducing accuracy.
Number of bags in batch Tubelets sampled per bag Video AP without uncertainty Video AP with uncertainty
4 4 33.5 35.0
3 5 33.6 34.1
2 8 33.3 34.2


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4 4 33.5 35.0
3 5 33.6 34.1
2 8 33.3 34.2
1 16 25.8 26.2
Table 3. Comparison to state-of-the-art methods on the UCF101-24 dataset in both
fully- and weakly-supervised scenarios.
Video AP at 0.2 Video AP at 0.5
Fully supervised
Peng et al. [35] 42.3 35.9
Hou et al. [17] 47.1 {
Weinzaepfel et al. [50] 58.9 {
Saha et al. [38] 63.1 33.1
Singh et al. [41] 73.5 46.3
Zhao et al. [52] 78.5 50.3
Singh et al. [40] 79.0 50.9
Kalogeiton et al. [19] 77.2 51.4
Ours 69.3 43.6
Weakly supervised
Escorcia et al. [8] 45.5 {
Ch eron et al. [6] 43.9 17.7
Ours 61.7 35.0
methods by a large margin. The top-half shows that our fully-supervised baseline


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Ours 61.7 35.0
methods by a large margin. The top-half shows that our fully-supervised baseline
is also competitive with the fully-supervised state-of-the-art, although that is not
the main goal of this work. The fully-supervised methods which outperform our
method are based on action detectors which directly predict the person proposals
with the network, and are thus able to handle the person annotation peculiarities
of the UCF101-24 dataset more eectively. We do not observe any issues with
person detections for our experiments on AVA in the next section.
Qualitative Results Figure 4 presents qualitative results of our method. The
rst two rows show success cases of our method where the tubelet detection
and linking have performed well. The third row shows a failure case, since the
basketball player represented by the green track is not actually performing the
\Basketball Dunk" action. According to the UCF101-24 annotations, only the
player represented with the blue track is performing this action. This video clip
is thus an example of a video where there are many people not performing the
action annotated for the video, and is especially challenging for our weaklysupervised method. The fourth row shows a dierent failure case as an error by
12 A. Arnab et al.


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12 A. Arnab et al.
Fig. 4. Qualitative examples on UCF101-24. Note that the bounding boxes are coloured
according to the identity of the track. The action label, and tube score are labelled
from the top-left of the bounding box. Further discussion is included in the text.
the online tubelet linking algorithm (we used the same method as [ 19]) has made
the identities of the two cyclists change after they occluded each other.
4.3 Experiments on AVA
In this section, we report what to our knowledge are the rst weakly-supervised
action detection experiments on AVA [ 14]. The AVA dataset labels keyframes
in a 15-minute video clip, where each keyframe is sampled every second ( i.e.at
1 Hz). The evaluation protocol of the AVA dataset measures the ability of an
action detection model to classify the actions occuring in a keyframe given the
temporal context around it.
We control the diculty of the weakly-supervised action recognition problem by combining the annotations from Nconsecutive keyframes into a single,
clip-level annotation. This eectively means that we are obtaining clip-level


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clip-level annotation. This eectively means that we are obtaining clip-level
annotations for sub-clips of Nseconds from the original AVA video. The weaklysupervised problem gets more dicult as Nincreases, as the sub-clips get longer
and the number of observed labels within each sub-clip increases. Note that when
N= 1, only the spatial localisation ability of the model is being tested, as during
training, it is unknown which of the subclip-level labels correspond to each person
tubelet in the MIL bag. When N > 1, the subclip-level labels can correspond
Uncertainty-Aware Weakly Supervised Action Detection 13
Table 4. Results of our method on the AVA dataset in terms of the Frame mAP at
an IoU threshold of 0.5. We vary the length of the sub-clips from which we extract
clip-level annotations to control the diculty of the weakly supervised problems. FS
denotes a fully-supervised baseline representing the upper bound on performance. A
sub-clip of 900 seconds is an entire AVA video clip.
Sub-clip duration (seconds)
FS 1 5 10 30 60 900
Frame AP 24.9 22.4 18.0 15.8 11.4 9.1 4.2


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Sub-clip duration (seconds)
FS 1 5 10 30 60 900
Frame AP 24.9 22.4 18.0 15.8 11.4 9.1 4.2
Table 5. State-of-the-art fully-supervised methods on the AVA dataset.
Method Frame AP
AVA (with optical 
ow) [14] 15.6
ARCN (with optical 
ow) [46] 17.4
Action Transformer [11] 25.0
SlowFast (ResNet 101) [9] 26.8
SlowFast (ResNet 50, Ours) 24.9
to zero, one or many of the person tubelets at dierent keyframes in the clip,
and it is thus a more dicult task. As an AVA video clip consists of 900 seconds,
N= 900 represents the most extreme case when spatio-temporal annotations are
discarded for the entire 15-minute video.
Table 4 shows the results of our model in this setting. As expected, the
performance of our method improves the shorter the sub-clip. For N= 1 and
N= 5, our method obtains 90% and 72% of fully-supervised performance
respectively, suggesting that bounding-box level annotations are not required for
training action recognition models if the video clips are annotated over short


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respectively, suggesting that bounding-box level annotations are not required for
training action recognition models if the video clips are annotated over short
temporal intervals. Understandably, the results from N= 900, where we use the
video-level annotations over the whole 15-minute clip are the worst as it is the
most dicult setting.
Figure 5 further analyses the per-class results for the dierent levels of
supervision presented in Tab. 4. As expected, stronger levels of supervision
(shorter sub-clip durations) result in better per-class accuracy. However, some
action classes are aected more than others by weaker labels (longer sub-clips).
Examples of this include \sing to" and \listen to" which show a larger dierence
to the fully-supervised baseline than other classes. Moreover, some classes such
as \watch (a person)", \get up", \close (e.g., a door, a box)" and \hand clap"
perform reasonably when trained with sub-clips ( N10), but much more poorly
when trained with longer sub-clips.
Finally, we compare our fully-supervised baseline to the state-of-the-art in
Tab. 5. Note that our weakly-supervised result from sub-clips of 10 seconds


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Tab. 5. Note that our weakly-supervised result from sub-clips of 10 seconds
(Tab. 4) outperforms the original fully-supervised baseline using introduced by
the AVA dataset [ 14] that uses both RGB and optical 
ow as inputs. Our model,
on the other hand, only uses RGB as its input modality. Our SlowFast model
14 A. Arnab et al.
Fig. 5. Per-class results, in terms of the Frame AP, on the AVA dataset under dierent
levels of supervision (the longer the sub-clip duration, the weaker the supervision). For
clarity, the rst 30 classes, ranked using the fully-supervised model, are shown. As
expected, action classes benet from stronger supervision, while some classes, such as
\watch", \get up" and \close" are very dicult to learn from long sub-clips.
performs similarly to the published results of the original authors [ 9]. Note that
we have not used Non-local [ 49], test-time augmentation or ensembling which
are all complementary methods to improve performance [ 9]. We can see that
in contrast to the UCF dataset in the previous section, our person detector is
accurate on AVA, and so a Fast-RCNN-style detector using person tubelets as


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in contrast to the UCF dataset in the previous section, our person detector is
accurate on AVA, and so a Fast-RCNN-style detector using person tubelets as
proposals can achieve state-of-the-art results.
5 Conclusion and Future Work
We have proposed a weakly supervised spatio-temporal action detection method
based on Multiple Instance Learning (MIL). Our approach incorporates uncertainty predictions made by the network such that it can better handle noise
in our bags and violations of the standard MIL assumption by predicting a
high uncertainty for noisy bags which cannot be classied correctly. We achieve
state-of-the-art results among weakly supervised methods on the UCF101-24
dataset, and also report the rst weakly-supervised results on AVA, which is the
only large-scale action recognition dataset. Our analysis of the accuracy trade-os
as the time intervals for which sub-clips of the video are annotated will also aid
future dataset annotation eorts.
Future work is to incorporate additional sources of noisy, weakly-labelled
data, such as data which can be scraped o internet search engines.
Uncertainty-Aware Weakly Supervised Action Detection 15
References


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data, such as data which can be scraped o internet search engines.
Uncertainty-Aware Weakly Supervised Action Detection 15
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Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
Gedas Bertasius1Heng Wang1Lorenzo Torresani1 2
Abstract
We present a convolution-free approach to video
classiﬁcation built exclusively on self-attention
over space and time. Our method, named “TimeSformer,” adapts the standard Transformer architecture to video by enabling spatiotemporal feature learning directly from a sequence of framelevel patches. Our experimental study compares different self-attention schemes and suggests that “divided attention,” where temporal
attention and spatial attention are separately applied within each block, leads to the best video
classiﬁcation accuracy among the design choices
considered. Despite the radically new design,
TimeSformer achieves state-of-the-art results on
several action recognition benchmarks, including the best reported accuracy on Kinetics-400
and Kinetics-600. Finally, compared to 3D
convolutional networks, our model is faster to
train, it can achieve dramatically higher test
efﬁciency (at a small drop in accuracy), and
it can also be applied to much longer video
clips (over one minute long). Code and models are available at: https://github.com/
facebookresearch/TimeSformer .
1. Introduction


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clips (over one minute long). Code and models are available at: https://github.com/
facebookresearch/TimeSformer .
1. Introduction
Over the last few years, the ﬁeld of natural language processing (NLP) has been revolutionized by the emergence of
methods based on self-attention (Vaswani et al., 2017a). Because of their excellent capabilities at capturing long-range
dependencies among words as well as their training scalability, self-attention architectures, such as the Transformer
model, represent the current state-of-the-art across a wide
range of language tasks, including machine translation (Ott
et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2018a), question answering (Devlin et al., 2019; Dai et al., 2019), and autoregressive word
generation (Radford et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020).
Video understanding shares several high-level similarities
1Facebook AI2Dartmouth College. Correspondence to: Gedas
Bertasius <gberta@seas.upenn.edu>.with NLP. First of all, videos and sentences are both sequential. Furthermore, precisely as the meaning of a word can
often be understood only by relating it to the other words in
the sentence, it may be argued that atomic actions in shortterm segments need to be contextualized with the rest of the


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often be understood only by relating it to the other words in
the sentence, it may be argued that atomic actions in shortterm segments need to be contextualized with the rest of the
video in order to be fully disambiguated. Thus, one would
expect the long-range self-attention models from NLP to be
highly effective for video modeling as well. However, in the
video domain, 2D or 3D convolutions still represent the core
operators for spatiotemporal feature learning across different video tasks (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019a; Teed & Deng,
2020; Bertasius & Torresani, 2020). While self-attention
has shown beneﬁts when applied on top of convolutional
layers (Wang et al., 2018a), to the best of our knowledge, no
attempt to use self-attention as the exclusive building block
for video recognition models has been reported.
In this work we pose the question of whether it may be
possible to build a performant convolution-free video architecture by replacing altogether the convolution operator with
self-attention. We argue that such a design has the potential to overcome a few inherent limitations of convolutional
models for video analysis. First, while their strong inductive
biases (e.g., local connectivity and translation equivariance)


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models for video analysis. First, while their strong inductive
biases (e.g., local connectivity and translation equivariance)
are undoubtedly beneﬁcial on small training sets, they may
excessively limit the expressivity of the model in settings
where there is ample availability of data and “all” can be
learned from examples. Compared to CNNs, Transformers
impose less restrictive inductive biases. This broadens the
family of functions they can represent (Cordonnier et al.,
2020; Zhao et al., 2020), and renders them better suited
to modern big-data regimes where there is less need for
strong inductive priors. Second, while convolutional kernels
are speciﬁcally designed to capture short-range spatiotemporal information, they cannot model dependencies that
extend beyond the receptive ﬁeld. While deep stacks of
convolutions (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2015; Szegedy et al.,
2015; Carreira & Zisserman, 2017) naturally extend the
receptive ﬁeld, these strategies are inherently limited in capturing long-range dependencies by means of aggregation
of shorter-range information. Conversely, the self-attention
mechanism can be applied to capture both local as well as


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of shorter-range information. Conversely, the self-attention
mechanism can be applied to capture both local as well as
global long-range dependencies by directly comparing feature activations at all space-time locations, much beyond the
receptive ﬁeld of traditional convolutional ﬁlters. Finally,arXiv:2102.05095v4  [cs.CV]  9 Jun 2021
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
despite the advances in GPU hardware acceleration, training
deep CNNs remains very costly, especially when applied to
high-resolution and long videos. Recent work in the stillimage domain (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020; Carion et al., 2020;
Zhao et al., 2020) has demonstrated that Transformers enjoy
faster training and inference compared to CNNs, making it
possible to construct models with larger learning capacity
for the same computational budget.
Motivated by these observations, we propose a video architecture built exclusively on self-attention. We adapt the
image model “Vision Transformer” (ViT) (Dosovitskiy et al.,
2020) to video by extending the self-attention mechanism
from the image space to the space-time 3D volume. Our
proposed model, named “TimeSformer” (from Time-Space


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from the image space to the space-time 3D volume. Our
proposed model, named “TimeSformer” (from Time-Space
Transformer), views the video as a sequence of patches extracted from the individual frames. As in ViT, each patch is
linearly mapped into an embedding and augmented with positional information. This makes it possible to interpret the
resulting sequence of vectors as token embeddings which
can be fed to a Transformer encoder, analogously to the
token features computed from words in NLP.
One downside of self-attention in standard Transformer is
that it requires computing a similarity measure for all pairs
of tokens. In our setting, this is computationally costly due
to the large number of patches in the video. To address these
challenges, we propose several scalable self-attention designs over the space-time volume and empirically evaluate
them over large-scale action classiﬁcation datasets. Among
the proposed schemes, we found that the best design is represented by a “divided attention” architecture which separately
applies temporal attention and spatial attention within each
block of the network. Compared to the established paradigm
of convolution-based video architecture, TimeSformer follows a radically different design. Yet, it achieves accuracy


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block of the network. Compared to the established paradigm
of convolution-based video architecture, TimeSformer follows a radically different design. Yet, it achieves accuracy
comparable, and in some cases superior, to the state-of-theart in this ﬁeld. We also show that our model can be used
for long-range modeling of videos spanning many minutes.
2. Related Work
Our approach is inﬂuenced by recent works that use selfattention for image classiﬁcation, either in combination with
the convolution operator or even as a full replacement for it.
Within the former class, Non-Local Networks (Wang et al.,
2018b) employ a non-local mean that effectively generalizes
the self-attention function of Transformers (Vaswani et al.,
2017b). Bello et al. (Bello et al., 2019) propose a 2D selfattention mechanism that is competitive as a replacement of
2D convolution but gives even stronger results when used to
augment convolutional features with self-attention features.
Beyond image categorization, Relation Networks (Hu et al.,
2018) and DETR (Carion et al., 2020) use self-attention on


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Beyond image categorization, Relation Networks (Hu et al.,
2018) and DETR (Carion et al., 2020) use self-attention on
top of convolutional feature maps for object detection.Our method is more closely related to image networks leveraging self-attention as a substitute for convolution (Parmar
et al., 2018; Ramachandran et al., 2019; Cordonnier et al.,
2020; Zhao et al., 2020). Since these works use individual
pixels as queries, in order to maintain a manageable computational cost and a small memory consumption, they must
restrict the scope of self-attention to local neighborhoods or
use global self-attention on heavily downsized versions of
the image. Alternative strategies for scalability to full images include sparse key-value sampling (Child et al., 2019)
or constraining the self-attention to be calculated along the
spatial axes (Ho et al., 2019; Huang et al., 2019; Wang
et al., 2020b). A few of the self-attention operators considered in our experiments adopt similar sparse and axial
computation, although generalized to the spatiotemporal
volume. However, the efﬁciency of our approach stems
mainly from decomposing the video into a sequence of
frame-level patches and then feeding linear embeddings of


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mainly from decomposing the video into a sequence of
frame-level patches and then feeding linear embeddings of
these patches as input token embeddings to a Transformer.
This strategy was recently introduced in Vision Transformers (ViT) (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020) which were shown to
deliver impressive performance on image categorization. In
this work, we build on the ViT design, and extend it to video
by proposing and empirically comparing several scalable
schemes for space-time self-attention over videos.
While Transformers have been recently used for video generation (Weissenborn et al., 2020), we are not aware of prior
video recognition architectures using self-attention as the
exclusive building block. However, we note that Transformers have been adopted on top of convolutional feature
maps for action localization and recognition (Girdhar et al.,
2019), video classiﬁcation (Wang et al., 2018b; Chen et al.,
2018b), and group activity recognition (Gavrilyuk et al.,
2020). We also note that there is a wide literature based on
the use of text Transformers combined with video CNNs
to address various video-language tasks, such as captioning (Zhou et al., 2018), question-answering (Yang et al.,


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to address various video-language tasks, such as captioning (Zhou et al., 2018), question-answering (Yang et al.,
2020) and dialog (Le et al., 2019). Finally, multimodal
video-text transformers (Sun et al., 2019; Li et al., 2020a)
have also been trained or pretrained in unsupervised fashion
by adopting masked-token pretext tasks adapted from the
language domain (Devlin et al., 2018; Radford et al., 2018).
3. The TimeSformer Model
Input clip. The TimeSformer takes as input a clip X2
RHW3Fconsisting of FRGB frames of size HW
sampled from the original video.
Decomposition into patches. Following the ViT (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020), we decompose each frame into N
non-overlapping patches, each of size PP, such that
theNpatches span the entire frame, i.e., N=HW=P2.
We ﬂatten these patches into vectors x(p;t)2R3P2with
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?


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Space Attention (S)  Joint Space-Time      Attention (ST)Divided Space-Time     Attention (T+S)<latexit


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Figure 1. The video self-attention blocks that we investigate in this work. Each attention layer implements self-attention (Vaswani et al.,
2017b) on a speciﬁed spatiotemporal neighborhood of frame-level patches (see Figure 2 for a visualization of the neighborhoods). We use
residual connections to aggregate information from different attention layers within each block. A 1-hidden-layer MLP is applied at the
end of each block. The ﬁnal model is constructed by repeatedly stacking these blocks on top of each other.
p= 1;:::;N denoting spatial locations and t= 1;:::;F
depicting an index over frames.
Linear embedding. We linearly map each patch x(p;t)into
an embedding vector z(0)
(p;t)2RDby means of a learnable
matrixE2RD3P2:
z(0)
(p;t)=Ex(p;t)+epos
(p;t)(1)
where epos
(p;t)2RDrepresents a learnable positional embedding added to encode the spatiotemporal position of each
patch. The resulting sequence of embedding vectors z(0)
(p;t)


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patch. The resulting sequence of embedding vectors z(0)
(p;t)
forp= 1;:::;N , andt= 1;:::;F represents the input to
the Transformer, and plays a role similar to the sequences of
embedded words that are fed to text Transformers in NLP.
As in the original BERT Transformer (Devlin et al., 2018),
we add in the ﬁrst position of the sequence a special learnable vector z(0)
(0;0)2RDrepresenting the embedding of the
classiﬁcation token.
Query-Key-Value computation. Our Transformer consists
ofLencoding blocks. At each block `, a query/key/value
vector is computed for each patch from the representation
z(`1)
(p;t)encoded by the preceding block:
q(`;a)
(p;t)=W(`;a)
QLN
z(`1)
(p;t)
2RDh(2)
k(`;a)
(p;t)=W(`;a)
KLN
z(`1)
(p;t)
2RDh(3)
v(`;a)


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KLN
z(`1)
(p;t)
2RDh(3)
v(`;a)
(p;t)=W(`;a)
VLN
z(`1)
(p;t)
2RDh(4)where LN() denotes LayerNorm (Ba et al., 2016), a=
1;:::;Ais an index over multiple attention heads and A
denotes the total number of attention heads. The latent
dimensionality for each attention head is set to Dh=D=A.
Self-attention computation. Self-attention weights are
computed via dot-product. The self-attention weights
(`;a)
(p;t)2RNF+1for query patch (p;t)are given by:
(`;a)
(p;t)= SM0
@q(`;a)
(p;t)pDh>
"
k(`;a)
(0;0)n
k(`;a)
(p0;t0)o
p0=1;:::;N
t0=1;:::;F#1
A
(5)
where SMdenotes the softmax activation function. Note


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p0=1;:::;N
t0=1;:::;F#1
A
(5)
where SMdenotes the softmax activation function. Note
that when attention is computed over one dimension only
(e.g., spatial-only or temporal-only), the computation is
signiﬁcantly reduced. For example, in the case of spatial
attention, only N+ 1 query-key comparisons are made,
using exclusively keys from the same frame as the query:
(`;a)space
(p;t)= SM0
@q(`;a)
(p;t)pDh>

k(`;a)
(0;0)n
k(`;a)
(p0;t)o
p0=1;:::;N1
A:
(6)
Encoding. The encoding z(`)
(p;t)at block`is obtained by
ﬁrst computing the weighted sum of value vectors using
self-attention coefﬁcients from each attention head:
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
frame tframe t - 


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Attention (S)   Joint Space-Time       Attention (ST)Divided Space-Time      Attention (T+S)  Sparse Local Global        Attention (L+G)  Axial Attention        (T+W+H)


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Figure 2. Visualization of the ﬁve space-time self-attention schemes studied in this work. Each video clip is viewed as a sequence of
frame-level patches with a size of 1616pixels. For illustration, we denote in blue the query patch and show in non-blue colors its
self-attention space-time neighborhood under each scheme. Patches without color are not used for the self-attention computation of the
blue patch. Multiple colors within a scheme denote attentions separately applied along different dimensions (e.g., space and time for
(T+S)) or over different neighborhoods (e.g., for (L+G)). Note that self-attention is computed for every single patch in the video clip, i.e.,
every patch serves as a query. We also note that although the attention pattern is shown for only two adjacent frames, it extends in the
same fashion to all frames of the clip.
s(`;a)
(p;t)=(`;a)
(p;t);(0;0)v(`;a)
(0;0)+NX
p0=1FX
t0=1(`;a)
(p;t);(p0;t0)v(`;a)
(p0;t0):
(7)


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(p;t);(p0;t0)v(`;a)
(p0;t0):
(7)
Then, the concatenation of these vectors from all heads
is projected and passed through an MLP, using residual
connections after each operation:
z0(`)
(p;t)=WO2
664s(`;1)
(p;t)
...
s(`;A)
(p;t)3
775+z(`1)
(p;t)(8)
z(`)
(p;t)= MLP
LN
z0(`)
(p;t)
+z0(`)
(p;t): (9)
Classiﬁcation embedding. The ﬁnal clip embedding is
obtained from the ﬁnal block for the classiﬁcation token:
y= LN
z(L)
(0;0)
2RD: (10)
On top of this representation we append a 1-hidden-layer
MLP, which is used to predict the ﬁnal video classes.
Space-Time Self-Attention Models. We can reduce the


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MLP, which is used to predict the ﬁnal video classes.
Space-Time Self-Attention Models. We can reduce the
computational cost by replacing the spatiotemporal attention of Eq. 5 with spatial attention within each frame only
(Eq. 6). However, such a model neglects to capture temporaldependencies across frames. As shown in our experiments,
this approach leads to degraded classiﬁcation accuracy compared to full spatiotemporal attention, especially on benchmarks where strong temporal modeling is necessary.
We propose a more efﬁcient architecture for spatiotemporal
attention, named “Divided Space-Time Attention” (denoted
with T+S), where temporal attention and spatial attention
are separately applied one after the other. This architecture
is compared to that of Space and Joint Space-Time attention
in Fig. 1. A visualization of the different attention models
on a video example is given in Fig. 2. For Divided Attention,
within each block `, we ﬁrst compute temporal attention by
comparing each patch (p;t)with all the patches at the same
spatial location in the other frames:
(`;a)time
(p;t)= SM0
@q(`;a)
(p;t)pDh>



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(`;a)time
(p;t)= SM0
@q(`;a)
(p;t)pDh>

k(`;a)
(0;0)n
k(`;a)
(p;t0)o
t0=1;:::;F1
A:
(11)
The encoding z0(`)time
(p;t)resulting from the application of
Eq. 8 using temporal attention is then fed back for spatial
attention computation instead of being passed to the MLP. In
other words, new key/query/value vectors are obtained from
z0(`)time
(p;t)and spatial attention is then computed using Eq. 6.
Finally, the resulting vector z0(`)space
(p;t)is passed to the MLP
of Eq. 9 to compute the ﬁnal encoding z(`)
(p;t)of the patch at
block`. For the model of divided attention, we learn distinct query/key/value matrices fW(`;a)
Qtime;W(`;a)
Ktime;W(`;a)
Vtimeg
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?


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Qtime;W(`;a)
Ktime;W(`;a)
Vtimeg
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
Attention Params K400 SSv2
Space 85.9M 76.9 36.6
Joint Space-Time 85.9M 77.4 58.5
Divided Space-Time 121.4M 78.0 59.5
Sparse Local Global 121.4M 75.9 56.3
Axial 156.8M 73.5 56.2
Table 1. Video-level accuracy for different space-time attention
schemes in TimeSformer. We evaluate the models on the validation sets of Kinetics-400 (K400), and Something-Something-V2
(SSv2). We observe that divided space-time attention achieves the
best results on both datasets.
andfW(`;a)
Qspace;W(`;a)
Kspace;W(`;a)
Vspacegover the time and space
dimensions. Note that compared to the (NF+ 1) comparisons per patch needed by the joint spatiotemporal attention
model of Eq. 5, Divided Attention performs only (N+F+2)
comparisons per patch. Our experiments demonstrate that


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model of Eq. 5, Divided Attention performs only (N+F+2)
comparisons per patch. Our experiments demonstrate that
this space-time factorization is not only more efﬁcient but it
also leads to improved classiﬁcation accuracy.
We have also experimented with a “Sparse Local Global”
(L+G) and an “Axial” (T+W+H) attention models. Their
architectures are illustrated in Fig. 1, while Fig. 2 shows
the patches considered for attention by these models. For
each patch (p;t), (L+G) ﬁrst computes a local attention by
considering the neighboring FH=2W=2patches and
then calculates a sparse global attention over the entire clip
using a stride of 2 patches along the temporal dimension and
also the two spatial dimensions. Thus, it can be viewed as a
faster approximation of full spatiotemporal attention using a
local-global decomposition and a sparsity pattern, similar to
that used in (Child et al., 2019). Finally, “Axial” attention
decomposes the attention computation in three distinct steps:
over time, width and height. A decomposed attention over
the two spatial axes of the image was proposed in (Ho


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decomposes the attention computation in three distinct steps:
over time, width and height. A decomposed attention over
the two spatial axes of the image was proposed in (Ho
et al., 2019; Huang et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020b) and
our (T+W+H) adds a third dimension (time) for the case
of video. All these models are implemented by learning
distinct query/key/value matrices for each attention step.
4. Experiments
We evaluate TimeSformer on four popular action recognition datasets: Kinetics-400 (Carreira & Zisserman, 2017),
Kinetics-600 (Carreira et al., 2018), Something-SomethingV2 (Goyal et al., 2017b), and Diving-48 (Li et al., 2018). We
adopt the “Base” ViT architecture (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020)
pretrained on either ImageNet-1K or ImageNet-21K (Deng
et al., 2009), as speciﬁed for each experiment. Unless differently indicated, we use clips of size 8224224, with
frames sampled at a rate of 1=32. The patch size is 1616
pixels. During inference, unless otherwise noted, we sample a single temporal clip in the middle of the video. We


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pixels. During inference, unless otherwise noted, we sample a single temporal clip in the middle of the video. We
use3spatial crops (top-left, center, bottom-right) from the
temporal clip and obtain the ﬁnal prediction by averaging
the scores for these 3crops.
8 32 64 96# of Input frames0510TFLOPsJoint Space-TimeDivided Space-Time224 336 448 560Spatial Crop (Px)0123TFLOPsJoint Space-TimeDivided Space-Time
Out of memory
Out of memoryFigure 3. We compare the video classiﬁcation cost (in TFLOPs) of
Joint Space-Time versus Divided Space-Time attention. We plot
the number of TFLOPs as a function of spatial crop size in pixels
(left), and the number of input frames (right). As we increase the
spatial resolution (left), or the video length (right), our proposed divided space-time attention leads to dramatic computational savings
compared to the scheme of joint space-time attention.
4.1. Analysis of Self-Attention Schemes
For this ﬁrst set of experiments we start from a ViT pretrained on ImageNet-21K. In Table 1, we present the results


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For this ﬁrst set of experiments we start from a ViT pretrained on ImageNet-21K. In Table 1, we present the results
obtained with TimeSformer for the ﬁve proposed space-time
attention schemes on Kinetics-400 (K400) and SomethingSomething-V2 (SSv2). First, we note that TimeSformer
with space-only attention (S) performs well on K400. This
is an interesting ﬁnding. Indeed, prior work (Sevilla-Lara
et al., 2021) has shown that on K400, spatial cues are more
important than temporal information in order to achieve
strong accuracy. Here, we show that it is possible to obtain
solid accuracy on K400 without any temporal modeling.
Note, however, that space-only attention performs poorly on
SSv2. This stresses the importance of temporal modeling
on this latter dataset.
Furthermore, we observe that divided space-time attention
achieves the best accuracy on both K400 and SSv2. This
makes sense because compared to joint space-time attention,
divided space-time attention has a larger learning capacity
(see Table 1) as it contains distinct learning parameters for
temporal attention and spatial attention.
In Figure 3, we also compare the computational cost of joint
space-time versus divided space-time attention when using


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temporal attention and spatial attention.
In Figure 3, we also compare the computational cost of joint
space-time versus divided space-time attention when using
higher spatial resolution (left) and longer (right) videos. We
note that the scheme of divided space-time scales gracefully
under both of these settings. In contrast, the scheme of
joint space-time attention leads to a dramatically higher cost
when resolution or video length is increased. In practice,
joint space-time attention causes a GPU memory overﬂow
once the spatial frame resolution reaches 448pixels, or once
the number of frames is increased to 32and thus it is effectively not applicable to large frames or long videos. Thus,
despite a larger number of parameters, divided space-time
attention is more efﬁcient than joint space-time attention
when operating on higher spatial resolution, or longer videos.
Thus, for all subsequent experiments we use a TimeSformer
constructed with divided space-time self-attention blocks.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
Model Pretrain K400 Training
Time (hours)K400
Acc.Inference
TFLOPsParams
I3D 8x8 R50 ImageNet-1K 444 71.0 1.11 28.0M


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Acc.Inference
TFLOPsParams
I3D 8x8 R50 ImageNet-1K 444 71.0 1.11 28.0M
I3D 8x8 R50 ImageNet-1K 1440 73.4 1.11 28.0M
SlowFast R50 ImageNet-1K 448 70.0 1.97 34.6M
SlowFast R50 ImageNet-1K 3840 75.6 1.97 34.6M
SlowFast R50 N/A 6336 76.4 1.97 34.6M
TimeSformer ImageNet-1K 416 75.8 0.59 121.4M
TimeSformer ImageNet-21K 416 78.0 0.59 121.4M
Table 2. Comparing TimeSformer to SlowFast and I3D. We observe that TimeSformer has lower inference cost despite having
a larger number of parameters. Furthermore, the cost of training
TimeSformer on video data is much lower compared to SlowFast
and I3D, even when all models are pretrained on ImageNet-1K.
4.2. Comparison to 3D CNNs
In this subsection we perform an empirical study aimed
at understanding the distinguishing properties of TimeSformer compared to 3D convolutional architectures, which
have been the prominent approach to video understanding


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In this subsection we perform an empirical study aimed
at understanding the distinguishing properties of TimeSformer compared to 3D convolutional architectures, which
have been the prominent approach to video understanding
in recent years. We focus our comparison on two 3D CNN
models: 1) SlowFast (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019b), which is
the state-of-the-art in video classiﬁcation, and 2) I3D (Carreira & Zisserman, 2017), which has been shown to beneﬁt
from image-based pretraining, similarly to our own model.
We present quantitative comparisons to these two networks
in Table 2 and highlight key observations below.
Model Capacity. From Table 2, we ﬁrst observe that although TimeSformer has a large learning capacity (the number of parameters is 121:4M), it has low inference cost
(0:59in TFLOPs). In contrast, SlowFast 8x8 R50 has a
larger inference cost ( 1:97TFLOPs) despite containing only
34:6Mparameters. Similarly, I3D 8x8 R50 also has a larger
inference cost ( 1:11TFLOPs) despite containing fewer parameters ( 28:0M). This suggests that TimeSformer is better


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inference cost ( 1:11TFLOPs) despite containing fewer parameters ( 28:0M). This suggests that TimeSformer is better
suited for settings that involve large-scale learning. In contrast, the large computational cost of modern 3D CNNs
makes it difﬁcult to further increase their model capacity
while also maintaining efﬁciency.
Video Training Time. One signiﬁcant advantage of ImageNet pretraining is that it enables very efﬁcient training of
TimeSformer on video data. Conversely, state-of-the-art 3D
CNNs are much more expensive to train even if pretrained
on image datasets. In Table 2, we compare the video training time on Kinetics-400 (in Tesla V100 GPU hours) of
TimeSformer to that of SlowFast and I3D. Starting from a
ResNet50 pretrained on ImageNet-1K, SlowFast 88R50
requires 3 840 Tesla V100 GPU hours in order to reach an
accuracy of 75:6%on Kinetics-400. Training I3D, under
similar settings, requires 1 440 Tesla V100 GPU hours for a
73:4%accuracy. In contrast, TimeSformer, also pretrained
on ImageNet-1K, only requires 416Tesla V100 GPU hours


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73:4%accuracy. In contrast, TimeSformer, also pretrained
on ImageNet-1K, only requires 416Tesla V100 GPU hours
to achieve a higher 75:8%accuracy (see Table 2). Furthermore, if we constrain SlowFast to be trained under a
somewhat similar computational budget as TimeSformerMethod Pretraining K400 SSv2
TimeSformer ImageNet-1K 75.8 59.5
TimeSformer ImageNet-21K 78.0 59.5
TimeSformer-HR ImageNet-1K 77.8 62.2
TimeSformer-HR ImageNet-21K 79.7 62.5
TimeSformer-L ImageNet-1K 78.1 62.4
TimeSformer-L ImageNet-21K 80.7 62.3
Table 3. Comparing the effectiveness of ImageNet-1K and
ImageNet-21K pretraining on Kinetics-400 (K400) and SomethingSomething-V2 (SSv2). On K400, ImageNet-21K pretraining leads
consistently to a better performance compared to ImageNet-1K pretraining. On SSv2, ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K pretrainings
lead to similar accuracy.


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lead to similar accuracy.
(i.e.,448GPU hours), its accuracy drops to 70:0%. Similarly, training I3D using a similar computational budget (i.e.,
444GPU hours) leads to a lower accuracy of 71:0%. This
highlights the fact that some of the latest 3D CNNs (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019b; Feichtenhofer, 2020) require a very
long optimization schedule to achieve good performance
(even when using ImageNet pretraining). In contrast, TimeSformer provides a more efﬁcient alternative to labs that do
not have access to hundreds of GPUs.
The Importance of Pretraining. Due to a large number
of parameters, training our model from scratch is difﬁcult.
Thus, before training TimeSformer on video data, we initialize it with weights learned from ImageNet. In contrast,
SlowFast can be learned on video data from scratch although
at the expense of a very high training cost (see Table 2). We
also attempted to train TimeSformer on Kinetics-400 directly, without any ImageNet pretraining. By using a longer
training schedule and more data augmentations, we found
it possible to train the model from scratch, albeit to a much
lower video level accuracy of 64:8%. Thus, based on these


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training schedule and more data augmentations, we found
it possible to train the model from scratch, albeit to a much
lower video level accuracy of 64:8%. Thus, based on these
results, for all subsequent studies we continued to use ImageNet for pretraining (Deng et al., 2009)
In Table 3 we study the beneﬁts of ImageNet-1K vs
ImageNet-21K pretraining on K400 and SSv2. For these
experiments, we use three variants of our model: (1) TimeSformer , which is the default version of our model operating
on8224224video clips, (2) TimeSformer-HR , a high
spatial resolution variant that operates on 16448448
video clips, and lastly (3) TimeSformer-L , a long-range
conﬁguration of our model that operates on 96224224
video clips with frames sampled at a rate of 1=4.
Based on the results in Table 3, we observe that ImageNet21K pretraining is beneﬁcial for K400, where it leads to
a consistently higher accuracy compared to ImageNet-1K
pretraining. On the other hand, on SSv2, we observe that


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a consistently higher accuracy compared to ImageNet-1K
pretraining. On the other hand, on SSv2, we observe that
ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K pretrainings lead to similar accuracy. This makes sense as SSv2 requires complex
spatiotemporal reasoning, whereas K400 is biased more towards spatial scene information, and thus, it beneﬁts more
from the features learned on the larger pretraining dataset.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
60K 120K 180K 240K# of Training Videos60657075AccuracyKinetics
TimeSformerSlowFastI3D42K 85K 127K 170K# of Training Videos354045505560AccuracySomething-Something-V2
TimeSformerSlowFastI3D
Figure 4. Accuracy on Kinetics-400 (K400), and SomethingSomething-V2 (SSv2) as a function of the number of training
videos. On K400, TimeSformer performs best in all cases. On
SSv2, which requires more complex temporal reasoning, TimeSformer outperforms the other models only when using enough
training videos. All models are pretrained on ImageNet-1K.
The Impact of Video-Data Scale. To understand the
effects of video-data scale on performance, we trained


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training videos. All models are pretrained on ImageNet-1K.
The Impact of Video-Data Scale. To understand the
effects of video-data scale on performance, we trained
TimeSformer on different subsets of K400 and SSv2:
f25%;50%;75%;100%gof the full datasets. We show
these results in Figure 4, where we also compare our method
with SlowFast R50 (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019b), and I3D
R50 (Carreira & Zisserman, 2017) trained on the same subsets and using the same pretraining. Since we do not have
access to a ResNet pretrained on ImageNet-21K, we use
ImageNet-1K pretraining for all 3architectures.
The results of Figure 4 show that, on K400, TimeSformer
outperforms the other models for all training subsets. However, we observe a different trend on SSv2, where TimeSformer is the strongest model only when trained on 75% or
100% of the full data. This may be explained by the fact that
compared to K400, SSv2 requires learning more complex
temporal patterns, and thus more examples are needed by
TimeSformer to learn effectively those patterns.
4.3. Varying the Number of Tokens


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temporal patterns, and thus more examples are needed by
TimeSformer to learn effectively those patterns.
4.3. Varying the Number of Tokens
The scalability of our model allows it to operate at higher
spatial resolution and on longer videos compared to most 3D
CNNs. We note that both of these aspects affect the length of
the sequence of tokens fed to the Transformer. Speciﬁcally,
increasing the spatial resolution results in a higher number
of patches (N) per frame. The number of input tokens is
also increased when using more frames. To investigate the
beneﬁts, we conduct an empirical study where we separately
increase the number of tokens along each of these two axes.
We report the ﬁndings in Figure 5. We see that increasing
the spatial resolution (up to a certain point) leads to a boost
in performance. Similarly, we observe that increasing the
length of the input clip leads to consistent accuracy gains.
Due to GPU memory constraints, we are not able to test
our model on clips longer than 96frames. Still, we would
like to point out that using clips of 96frames is a signiﬁcant
departure from current convolutional models, which are
typically limited to processing inputs of 832frames.


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departure from current convolutional models, which are
typically limited to processing inputs of 832frames.
8 32 64 96Number of Input Frames65707580Clip Accuracy224 336 448 560Spatial Crop Side (Px)65707580Clip AccuracyFigure 5. Clip-level accuracy on Kinetics-400 as a function of spatial crop size in pixels (left), and the number of input frames (right).
Positional Embedding K400 SSv2
None 75.4 45.8
Space-only 77.8 52.5
Space-Time 78.0 59.5
Table 4. Ablation on positional embeddings. The version of TimeSformer using space-time positional embeddings yields the highest
accuracy on both Kinetics-400 and SSv2.
4.4. The Importance of Positional Embeddings
To investigate the importance of our learned spatiotemporal positional embeddings, we also conduct experiments
with a few variants of TimeSformer that use: (1) no positional embedding, (2) space-only positional embedding,
and (3) space-time positional embedding. We report these
results in Table 4. Based on these results, we observe
that the variant of our model that uses space-time positional embeddings produces the best accuracy on both


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results in Table 4. Based on these results, we observe
that the variant of our model that uses space-time positional embeddings produces the best accuracy on both
Kinetics-400, and Something-Something-V2. Interestingly,
we also observe that using space-only positional embeddings leads to solid results on Kinetics-400, but much worse
results on Something-Something-V2. This makes sense as
Kinetics-400 is more spatially biased, whereas SomethingSomething-V2 requires complex temporal reasoning.
4.5. Comparison to the State-of-the-Art
Kinetics-400 & Kinetics-600. In Table 5 we present our
results on the validation set of K400. For these experiments,
we use TimeSformer pretrained on ImageNet-21K. In addition to the accuracy metrics, we also include inference
cost, given in TFLOPs. We note that whereas most previous
Method Top-1 Top-5 TFLOPs
R(2+1)D (Tran et al., 2018) 72.0 90.0 17.5
bLVNet (Fan et al., 2019) 73.5 91.2 0.84
TSM (Lin et al., 2019) 74.7 N/A N/A
S3D-G (Xie et al., 2018) 74.7 93.4 N/A


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S3D-G (Xie et al., 2018) 74.7 93.4 N/A
Oct-I3D+NL (Chen et al., 2019) 75.7 N/A 0.84
D3D (Stroud et al., 2020) 75.9 N/A N/A
I3D+NL (Wang et al., 2018b) 77.7 93.3 10.8
ip-CSN-152 (Tran et al., 2019) 77.8 92.8 3.2
CorrNet (Wang et al., 2020a) 79.2 N/A 6.7
LGD-3D-101 (Qiu et al., 2019) 79.4 94.4 N/A
SlowFast (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019b) 79.8 93.9 7.0
X3D-XXL (Feichtenhofer, 2020) 80.4 94.6 5.8
TimeSformer 78.0 93.7 0.59
TimeSformer-HR 79.7 94.4 5.11
TimeSformer-L 80.7 94.7 7.14
Table 5. Video-level accuracy on Kinetics-400.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
Method Top-1 Top-5


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Table 5. Video-level accuracy on Kinetics-400.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
Method Top-1 Top-5
I3D-R50+Cell (Wang et al., 2020c) 79.8 94.4
LGD-3D-101 (Qiu et al., 2019) 81.5 95.6
SlowFast (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019b) 81.8 95.1
X3D-XL (Feichtenhofer, 2020) 81.9 95.5
TimeSformer 79.1 94.4
TimeSformer-HR 81.8 95.8
TimeSformer-L 82.2 95.6
Table 6. Video-level accuracy on Kinetics-600.
1 3 5 10
# of Testing Clips65707580Accuracy
TimeSformer-L
TimeSformer
SlowFast-R101+NL
X3D-XL
Figure 6. Video-level accuracy on Kinetics-400 vs the number of
temporal clips used during inference. TimeSformer-L achieves
excellent accuracy using a small number of clips, which leads to
strong performance at low inference cost.
methods use 10temporal clips with 3spatial crops (for a total of 30space-time views) during inference, TimeSformer


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strong performance at low inference cost.
methods use 10temporal clips with 3spatial crops (for a total of 30space-time views) during inference, TimeSformer
achieves solid accuracy with only 3views (3 spatial crops),
which reduces the inference cost. Our long-range variant,
TimeSformer-L achieves a top-1 accuracy of 80:7%. Furthermore, our default TimeSformer has the lowest inference
cost among recent state-of-the-art models. Yet, it still provides a solid accuracy of 78:0%, outperforming many more
costly models.
We also measured the actual inference runtime on 20Kvalidation videos of Kinetics-400 (using 8Tesla V100 GPUs).
Whereas SlowFast takes 14:88hours to complete the inference, TimeSformer, TimeSformer-HR, and TimeSformer-L
take36minutes, 1:06hours and 2:6hours, respectively.
Thus, even though SlowFast and TimeSformer-L have comparable cost in terms of TFLOPs, in practice the runtimes
of all our versions of TimeSformer are much lower.
In Table 6, we also present our results on Kinetics-600.
Just like on Kinetics-400, we observe that TimeSformer
performs well on this benchmark, outperforming all prior
methods.


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Just like on Kinetics-400, we observe that TimeSformer
performs well on this benchmark, outperforming all prior
methods.
Finally, in Figure 6, we study the effect of using multiple temporal clips during inference (each with a single
spatial crop). We plot accuracy using K2f1;3;5;10g
temporal clips for testing. We compare our model against
X3D (Feichtenhofer, 2020), and SlowFast (Feichtenhofer
et al., 2019b). X3D and SlowFast require multiple ( 5)
clips to approach their top accuracy. Conversely, our longrange variant, TimeSformer-L, does not require multiple
clips to achieve its best performance, since it is able to spanMethod SSv2 Diving-48
SlowFast (Feichtenhofer et al., 2019b) 61.7 77.6
TSM (Lin et al., 2019) 63.4 N/A
STM (Jiang et al., 2019) 64.2 N/A
MSNet (Kwon et al., 2020) 64.7 N/A
TEA (Li et al., 2020b) 65.1 N/A
bLVNet (Fan et al., 2019) 65.2 N/A
TimeSformer 59.5 74.9


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bLVNet (Fan et al., 2019) 65.2 N/A
TimeSformer 59.5 74.9
TimeSformer-HR 62.2 78.0
TimeSformer-L 62.4 81.0
Table 7. Video-level accuracy on Something-Something-V2 and
Diving-48.Due to an issue with Diving-48 labels used in previously published results, we only compare our method with a
reproduced SlowFast 168R101 model. All models are pretained on ImageNet-1K.
about 12seconds of a Kinetics video with a single clip.
Something-Something-V2 & Diving-48. In Table 7, we
also validate our model on SSv2 and Diving-48. Since
ImageNet-21K pretraining does not improve accuracy on
SSv2 (see Table 3), in this case, we use TimeSformer pretrained on ImageNet-1K. This also allows us to apply the
same pretraining to all other models in this comparison,
using a ResNet pretrained on ImageNet-1K. Our results suggest that TimeSformer achieves lower accuracy than the best
models on this dataset. However, considering that our model
uses a completely different design, we take these results as
suggesting that TimesSformer is a promising approach even


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models on this dataset. However, considering that our model
uses a completely different design, we take these results as
suggesting that TimesSformer is a promising approach even
for challenging temporally-heavy datasets, such as SSv2.
In Table 7, we also present our method on another
“temporally-heavy” dataset, Diving-48. Due to a recently
discovered issue with a previous version of Diving-48 labels,
here, we only compare our method with a reproduced SlowFast168R101 model. Our results show that TimeSformer
outperforms SlowFast by a substantial margin.
4.6. Long-Term Video Modeling
Lastly, we evaluate TimeSformer on the task of long-term
video modeling using HowTo100M (Miech et al., 2019).
HowTo100M is an instructional video dataset that contains
around 1M instructional Web videos showing humans performing over 23K different tasks, such as cooking, repairing,
making arts, etc. The average duration of these videos is
around 7minutes, which is orders of magnitude longer than
the duration of videos in standard action recognition benchmarks. Each HowTo100M video has a label indicating the
task demonstrated in the video (one out of the 23K classes),
which can be used for supervised training. Thus, it is a good


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task demonstrated in the video (one out of the 23K classes),
which can be used for supervised training. Thus, it is a good
benchmark to assess the ability of a model to recognize
activities exhibited over very long temporal extents.
For this evaluation, we consider only categories that have
at least 100 video examples. This gives a subset of
HowTo100M corresponding to 120Kvideos spanning 1059
task categories. We randomly partition this collection into
85Ktraining videos and 35Ktesting videos.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
Method # Input
FramesSingle Clip
Coverage# Test
ClipsTop-1
Acc
SlowFast 8 8.5s 48 48.2
SlowFast 32 34.1s 12 50.8
SlowFast 64 68.3s 6 51.5
SlowFast 96 102.4s 4 51.2
TimeSformer 8 8.5s 48 56.8
TimeSformer 32 34.1s 12 61.2
TimeSformer 64 68.3s 6 62.2
TimeSformer 96 102.4s 4 62.6
Table 8. Long-term task classiﬁcation on HowTo100M. Given a
video spanning several minutes, the goal is to predict the long-term
task demonstrated in the video (e.g., cooking breakfast, cleaning


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video spanning several minutes, the goal is to predict the long-term
task demonstrated in the video (e.g., cooking breakfast, cleaning
house, etc). We evaluate a few variants of SlowFast and TimeSformer on this task. “Single Clip Coverage” denotes the number
of seconds spanned by a single clip. “# Test Clips” is the average
number of clips needed to cover the entire video during inference.
All models in this comparison are pretrained on Kinetics-400.
We present our results in Table 8. As our baselines, we use
four variants of SlowFast R101, all operating on video clips
sampled at a frame rate of 1=32but having varying number
of frames: 8;32;64and96. We use the same four conﬁgurations for TimeSformer, starting from a ViT pretrained
on ImageNet-21K. All models in this comparison are pretrained on Kinetics-400 before ﬁnetuning on HowTo100M.
During inference, for each method, we sample as many
non-overlapping temporal clips as needed to cover the full
temporal extent of a video, e.g., if a single clip spans 8:5
seconds, we would sample 48test clips to cover a video of
410seconds. Video-level classiﬁcation is done by averaging


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seconds, we would sample 48test clips to cover a video of
410seconds. Video-level classiﬁcation is done by averaging
the clip predictions.
From the results in Table 8 we ﬁrst note that, for the same
single clip coverage, TimeSformer outperforms the corresponding SlowFast by a large margin of 811%. We also
observe that longer-range TimeSformers do better, i.e., our
longest-range variant achieves the best video-level classiﬁcation accuracy. These results suggest that our model is highly
suitable for tasks that require long-term video modeling.
We also experimented with ﬁnetuning TimeSformer directly
from a ViT pretrained on ImageNet-1K and ImageNet21K (skipping the Kinetics-400 training). We report that
when pretrained only on ImageNet-1K, our model achieves
top-1 accuracies of 52:8;58:4;59:2;59:4for8;32;64;96
frame inputs, respectively. When considering ImagNet21K pretraining, TimeSformer produces top-1 accuracies of
56:0;59:2;60:2;62:1for8;32;64;96frame inputs, respectively. These results demonstrate that our model can effectively exploit long-range temporal dependencies regardless


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of the pretraining dataset that we use.
4.7. Additional Ablations
Smaller & Larger Transformers. In addition to the “Base”
ViT model (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020), we also experimented
with the “Large” ViT. We report that this yielded results 1%
Figure 7. Visualization of space-time attention from the output
token to the input space on Something-Something-V2. Our model
learns to focus on the relevant parts in the video in order to perform
spatiotemporal reasoning.
ViT-50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 10 20 30 40 50-50-40-30-20-1001020304050
-60 -40 -20 0 20 40-40-30-20-1001020304050       TimeSformer w/ Divided            Space-Time Attention-60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60-60-40-200204060    TimeSformer  w/ Space Attention
Figure 8. Feature visualization with t-SNE (van der Maaten & Hinton, 2008) on Something-Something-V2. Each video is visualized
as a point. Videos belonging to the same action category have the
same color. The TimeSformer with divided space-time attention


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as a point. Videos belonging to the same action category have the
same color. The TimeSformer with divided space-time attention
learns semantically more separable features than the TimeSformer
with space-only attention or ViT (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020).
worse on both Kinetics-400, and Something-Something-V2.
Given that our “Base” model already has 121Mparameters,
we suspect that the current datasets are not big enough to
justify a further increase in model capacity. We also tried
the “Small” ViT variant, which produced accuracies about
5%worse than our default “Base” ViT model.
Larger Patch Size. We also experimented with a different
patch size, i.e., P= 32 . We report that this variant of our
model produced results about 3%worse than our default
variant using P= 16 . We conjecture that the performance
decrease with P= 32 is due to the reduced spatial granularity. We did not train any models with Pvalues lower than
16 as those models have a much higher computational cost.
The Order of Space and Time Self-Attention. Our proposed “Divided Space-Time Attention” scheme applies temporal attention and spatial attention one after the other. Here,
we investigate whether reversing the order of time-space


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we investigate whether reversing the order of time-space
attention (i.e., applying spatial attention ﬁrst, then temporal) has an impact on our results. We report that applying spatial attention ﬁrst, followed by temporal attention
leads to a 0:5%drop in accuracy on both Kinetics-400, and
Something-Something-V2. We also tried a parallel spacetime self-attention. We report that it produces 0:4%lower
accuracy compared to our adopted “Divided Space-Time
Attention” scheme.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
4.8. Qualitative Results
Visualizing Learned Space-Time Attention. In Figure 7,
we present space-time attention visualizations obtained by
applying TimeSformer on Something-Something-V2 videos.
To visualize the learned attention, we use the Attention
Rollout scheme presented in (Abnar & Zuidema, 2020).
Our results suggest that TimeSformer learns to attend to the
relevant regions in the video in order to perform complex
spatiotemporal reasoning. For example, we can observe that
the model focuses on the conﬁguration of the hand when
visible and the object-only when not visible.
Visualizing Learned Feature Embeddings. In Figure 8,


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the model focuses on the conﬁguration of the hand when
visible and the object-only when not visible.
Visualizing Learned Feature Embeddings. In Figure 8,
we also visualize the features learned by TimeSformer on
Something-Something-V2. The visualization is done using
t-SNE (van der Maaten & Hinton, 2008) where each point
represents a single video, and different colors depict different action categories. Based on this illustration, we observe
that TimeSformer with divided space-time attention learns
semantically more separable features than the TimeSformer
with space-only attention or ViT (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020).
5. Conclusion
In this work, we introduced TimeSformer, a fundamentally
different approach to video modeling compared to the established paradigm of convolution-based video networks.
We showed that it is possible to design an effective, and
scalable video architecture built exclusively on space-time
self-attention. Our method (1) is conceptually simple, (2)
achieves state-of-the-art results on major action recognition
benchmarks, (3) has low training and inference cost, and (4)
can be applied to clips of over one minute, thus enabling


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benchmarks, (3) has low training and inference cost, and (4)
can be applied to clips of over one minute, thus enabling
long-term video modeling. In the future, we plan to extend our method to other video analysis tasks such as action
localization, video captioning and question-answering.
Appendix
A. Implementation Details
Our TimeSformer implementation is built using PySlowFast (Fan et al., 2020) and pytorch-image-models (Wightman, 2019) packages. Below, we describe speciﬁc implementation details regarding the training and inference procedures of our model.
Training. We train our model for 15epochs with an initial
learning rate of 0:005, which is divided by 10at epochs
11;and14. During training, we ﬁrst resize the shorter
side of the video to a random value in [256;320]. We then
randomly sample a 224224crop from the resized video.
For our high-resolution model, TimeSformer-HR, we resize
the shorter side of the video to a random value in [448;512],
and then randomly sample a 448448crop. We randomlysample clips from the full-length videos with a frame rate
of1=32. The batch size is set to 16. We train all our models


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of1=32. The batch size is set to 16. We train all our models
using synchronized SGD across 32GPUs. The momentum
is set to 0:9, while the weight decay is set to 0:0001 .
Unless otherwise noted, in our experiments we use the
“Base” ViT model (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020). Temporal and
spatial attention layers in each block are initialized with the
same weights, which are obtained from the corresponding
attention layer in ViT.
Inference. As discussed in the main draft, during inference
we sample a single temporal clip in the middle of the video.
We scale the shorter spatial side of a video to 224pixels (or
448for TimeSformer-HR) and take 3crops of size 224224
(448448for TimeSformer-HR) to cover a larger spatial
extent within the clip. The ﬁnal prediction is obtained by
averaging the softmax scores of these 3predictions.
Other models in our comparison. To train I3D (Carreira
& Zisserman, 2017), and SlowFast (Feichtenhofer et al.,
2019b), we use the training protocols that were used in the
original papers. For I3D, we initialize it with a 2D ImageNet


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2019b), we use the training protocols that were used in the
original papers. For I3D, we initialize it with a 2D ImageNet
CNN, and then train it for 118epochs with a base learning
rate of 0:01, which is divided by 10at epochs 44and88.
We use synchronized SGD across 32GPUs following the
linear scaling recipe of Goyal et al. (2017a). We set the
momentum to 0:9, and weight decay to 0:0001 . The batch
size is set to 64. For the SlowFast model, when initialized
from ImageNet weights, we use this same exact training
protocol. When training SlowFast from scratch, we use the
training protocol described by the authors (Feichtenhofer
et al., 2019b). More speciﬁcally, in that case, the training
is done for 196epochs with a cosine learning rate schedule,
and the initial learning rate is set to 0:1. We use a linear
warm-up for the ﬁrst 34epochs starting with a learning rate
of0:01. A dropout of 0:5is used before the ﬁnal classiﬁcation layer. The momentum is set to 0:9, the weight decay is


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0:0001 , and the batch size is set to 64. Just as before, we
adopt the linear scaling recipe (Goyal et al., 2017a).
Datasets. Kinetics-400 (Carreira & Zisserman, 2017) consists of 240Ktraining videos and 20Kvalidation videos
that span 400human action categories. Kinetics-600 (Carreira et al., 2018) has 392Ktraining videos and 30Kvalidation videos spanning 600action categories. SomethingSomething-V2 (Goyal et al., 2017b) contains 170Ktraining
videos and 25Kvalidation videos that span 174action categories. Lastly, Diving-48 (Li et al., 2018) has 16Ktraining
videos and 3Ktesting videos spanning 48ﬁne-grained diving categories. For all of these datasets, we use standard
classiﬁcation accuracy as our main performance metric.
Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?
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Uniﬁed Graph Structured Models for Video Understanding
Anurag Arnab Chen Sun Cordelia Schmid
Google Research
faarnab, chensun, cordelias g@google.com
Abstract
Accurate video understanding involves reasoning about
the relationships between actors, objects and their environment, often over long temporal intervals. In this paper,
we propose a message passing graph neural network that
explicitly models these spatio-temporal relations and can
use explicit representations of objects, when supervision is
available, and implicit representations otherwise. Our formulation generalises previous structured models for video
understanding, and allows us to study how different design choices in graph structure and representation affect
the model’s performance. We demonstrate our method on
two different tasks requiring relational reasoning in videos
– spatio-temporal action detection on AVA and UCF10124, and video scene graph classiﬁcation on the recent Action Genome dataset – and achieve state-of-the-art results
on all three datasets. Furthermore, we show quantitatively
and qualitatively how our method is able to more effectively
model relationships between relevant entities in the scene.
1. Introduction
Deep learning has enabled rapid advances in many image understanding tasks such as image classiﬁcation [20],
object detection [46] and semantic segmentation [7]. However, progress on recent video understanding datasets such


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object detection [46] and semantic segmentation [7]. However, progress on recent video understanding datasets such
as A V A [17] and Charades [49] has lagged behind in comparison. Further progress in the video understanding tasks
posed by these datasets would facilitate applications in autonomous vehicles, health monitoring and automated media
analysis and production among others.
A reason why video understanding is so challenging is
because, as shown in Fig. 1, it requires understanding the
interactions between actors, objects and other context in the
scene. Furthermore, these interactions are not always observable from a single frame, and thus require reasoning
over long temporal intervals. This is illustrated in Fig. 1,
where understanding the actions of the person in the centreframe is not possible from the target keyframe alone. In order to know that the woman is “listening”, we need to con-sider the man who is speaking but no longer in the scene.
And to correctly infer that the woman is “driving” the car,
rather than “riding” like the man, we must take into account
that she is later holding the steering wheel.
Video is a signiﬁcantly higher-dimensional signal than
single images, due to its additional temporal axis, and so we
believe learning these unlabelled interactions directly from
current datasets with large convolutional networks is not


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single images, due to its additional temporal axis, and so we
believe learning these unlabelled interactions directly from
current datasets with large convolutional networks is not
feasible. In this paper, we propose a structured graph neural
network to explicitly model these spatio-temporal interactions. We model actors and objects (explicitly with bounding boxes when we have supervision, and implicitly otherwise) as nodes in our spatio-temporal graph and perform
message passing inference to directly model their relations.
Although a wide range of graph-structured models have
been proposed for action recognition, we note that there has
been no unifying formulation for these models. As such,
some works only model spatial relations between actors
and objects [14, 54], but not how these interactions evolve
over time. Other approaches model long-range temporal
interactions [61], but do not capture spatial relations and
are not trained end-to-end. And whilst some methods do
model spatio-temporal interactions of objects [3, 60], their
explicit representations of objects need additional supervision, and are not evaluated on spatio-temporal localisation
tasks which requires detailed understanding and is necessary for analysing untrimmed videos.
Our graph network formulation based on the messagepassing neural network [13] abstraction, allows us to explicitly model interactions between actors, objects and


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Our graph network formulation based on the messagepassing neural network [13] abstraction, allows us to explicitly model interactions between actors, objects and
the scene, and how these interactions evolve over time.
Our ﬂexible model allows us to use explicit object representations from a pretrained Region Proposal Network
(RPN) [46], and/or implicitly from convolutional feature
maps without additional supervision. Moreover, our general
formulation allows us to interpret previous work [14, 54, 60,
61, 71] as special cases, and thus understand how different
design choices in object representation, graph connectivity
and message passing functions affect the model’s performance. We demonstrate our versatile model on two different tasks: spatio-temporal action detection on A V A [17]arXiv:2103.15662v1  [cs.CV]  29 Mar 2021
TimeTarget keyframeLabels: listen, drive, sit…………Figure 1: Understanding videos requires reasoning over long-term spatio-temporal interactions between actors, objects and the environment. The actions of the woman in the centre frame are ambiguous given the nearby frames which typical 3D CNN architectures consider.
However, by considering her interactions with the man from nearby frames, we know she is “listening” to him. And the fact that she is later


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However, by considering her interactions with the man from nearby frames, we know she is “listening” to him. And the fact that she is later
holding the steering wheel indicates she is “driving” in contrast to the man who is “riding”. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal
graph on which we perform message passing to explicitly model these spatio-temporal interactions. Example from the A V A dataset [17].
and UCF101-24 [53], and video scene graph prediction on
the recent Action Genome [23] dataset. Both of these tasks
require modelling the spatio-temporal interactions between
the actors and/or objects in the scene, and we show consistent improvements from using each component of our
model and achieve state-of-the-art results on each dataset.
Furthermore, we observe that the largest improvements
in A V A are indeed achieved on action classes involving
human-to-human and human-to-object interactions, and visualisations of our network show that it is focusing on scene
context that is intuitively relevant to its action classiﬁcation.
2. Related Work
Modelling contextual relationships has a long history in
scene understanding. Relevant examples of early works in
this area included modelling interactions between humans
and objects [18, 68], different objects [45] and relationships


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scene understanding. Relevant examples of early works in
this area included modelling interactions between humans
and objects [18, 68], different objects [45] and relationships
between human actions and scene context [41, 16]. Furthermore, it has also been shown that human vision is reliant on
context too [43]. In this paper, we consider video understanding tasks, speciﬁcally spatio-temporal action recognition and video scene graph parsing, which involve reasoning
about interactions between actors, objects and their environment in both space and time.
Early work in action recognition used hand-crafted features to encode motion information [32, 58]. Advances
in deep learning ﬁrst saw repurposing of 2D image convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for video as “two
stream” networks [27, 50] followed by spatio-temporal 3D
CNNs [6, 12, 55, 72]. However, these architectures focus on extracting coarse, video-level features and are not
suitable for learning the ﬁne-grained relations depicted in
Fig. 1. Consequently, whilst initial approaches to spatiotemporal action detection involved extending 2D object detectors [38, 46] temporally [26, 51, 1, 65], current leading
methods [14, 61, 71] on the A V A dataset [17] all explicitly


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methods [14, 61, 71] on the A V A dataset [17] all explicitly
model relationships, with approaches which we show can
be interpreted as variants of graph neural networks.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) explicitly model relations between entities by modelling them as nodes in adirected or undirected graph [5, 48, 29], which interact
via a neighbourhood deﬁned for each node. The selfattention [56] and Non-local [59] operators can also be
thought of as GNNs [5, 13] where each element in a feature map is a node, and all nodes are fully-connected to
each other. Such attention-based models have excelled at
a number of natural language processing and computer vision tasks and have inspired many follow-up methods [21,
8, 9, 62, 70].
Many structured models have also recently been employed in video understanding. However, there has previously been no coherent framework to unify these approaches. Consequently, some works only model spatial relations between actors and objects, but not how these evolve
over time [54, 14]. And whilst LFB [61] models long range
temporal interactions, it does not capture spatial relationships within a keyframe. Moreover, in order to model longrange interactions, [61] uses precomputed features and is
thus not trained end-to-end. Our proposed method, which is


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thus not trained end-to-end. Our proposed method, which is
based on the message passing neural network (MPNN) [13]
framework, coherently models both spatial and temporal
interactions. After describing our model in Sec. 3, we
show how previous structured models for action detection [54, 14, 60, 61, 71] can be thought of as special cases
of our model. Furthermore, our ﬂexible model can reason
about objects both when we have explicit supervision for
them, and when we do not. Prior work in video understanding, which have proposed less generic models, have either
assumed the case of explicit object supervision [3, 60] or
not [54, 14, 71], but have not considered the scenario when
both options are available. Furthermore, our general formulation allows us to ablate graph modelling design choices,
such as the object representation, message passing functions and temporal context, in a manner not possible with
these previous, more speciﬁc approaches. Moreover, we
note that some approaches which have employed spatiotemporal graphs in video have only considered frame-toframe interactions [22, 60, 3, 40, 42, 44], rather than longrange relations, and have not evaluated on spatio-temporal
localisation which requires more detailed understanding
3D CNN
sit, answer phone, carry/hold 
object


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string_value:
localisation which requires more detailed understanding
3D CNN
sit, answer phone, carry/hold 
object
sit, touch (an object), watch (a 
person), talk (a person)
sit, touch (an object), watch (a 
person), listen (a person)
Readout Function, 

Spatio
temporal graph 
construction and message passing
Foreground node
Implicit context
Explicit contextFigure 2: Overview of our method: We construct a spatio-temporal graph, and perform message-passing inference on it, to model interactions between actors, objects and their environment. Foreground nodes (circles) have readout functions associated with them for the task of
interest ( i.e. for action recognition, the nodes represent person bounding boxes which are classiﬁed into actions). Context nodes (squares)
model additional information, and can either be implicit, as cells of the original feature map, or explicit by ROI-pooling external region
proposals (RPN [46] not shown for clarity). The initial state of each node is a spatio-temporal feature vector extracted from a 3D CNN.
and is essential for analysing untrimmed videos.
We also note that scene graph parsing [25, 30] is another task that evaluates a model’s ability to reason about


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and is essential for analysing untrimmed videos.
We also note that scene graph parsing [25, 30] is another task that evaluates a model’s ability to reason about
the interactions between different objects by representing
objects as nodes and relationships as edges in a graph. Although the task was originally posed for single images [30],
the recent Action Genome [23] dataset extends this task
to video by adding annotations to Charades [49]. While
GNN-based approaches have also been used in scene graph
parsing [10, 33, 64, 66] for single images, to our knowledge, they have not been applied to model temporal relations in video. Moreover, the same model has not also been
demonstrated on spatio-temporal action recognition like our
method.
3. Proposed Approach
Our model aims to build a structured representation of
a video by representing it as a graph of actors, objects
and contextual elements in the scene, as shown in Fig. 2.
This structured representation is then used to perform tasks
which require understanding the interactions between the
elements in the graph, such as action recognition and scene
graph prediction. Note that we do not assume we have annotations for relevant scene context.
Our approach is based on Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNN) [13], as it is a ﬂexible framework that generalises many previous graph neural network algorithms [4,


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string_value:
Our approach is based on Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNN) [13], as it is a ﬂexible framework that generalises many previous graph neural network algorithms [4,
5, 29, 57] We review this approach, and describe how we
adapt it for video understanding in Sec. 3.1, before detailing our model in Sec. 3.2 through 3.5. Finally, we dis-cuss how previous structured models for video understanding [14, 54, 60, 61, 71] can be regarded as speciﬁc instantiations of our model in Sec. 3.6.
3.1. Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs)
MPNNs operate on a directed or undirected graph, G
consisting of nodes, v2V, and a neighbourhood for each
node,Nv, that deﬁnes the graph’s connectivity. For video
models we distinguish between the spatial, Sv, and temporal,Tv, neighbourhoods for node v(Nv=Sv[Tv). Each
node,v, is associated with a latent state, hv. Inference in
this model consists of a message passing phase, and a ﬁnal readout phase. In the message passing phase, messages
for each node, mv, are ﬁrst computed by applying spatial


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for each node, mv, are ﬁrst computed by applying spatial
and temporal message passing functions, MsandMtrespectively, to all nodes in its neighbourhood as described in
Eq. (1). An update function, U, then aggregates the received
messages to update the latent state, hv,
mi+1
v=X
w2SvMs(hi
v;hi
w;i
s) +X
u2TvMt(hi
v;hi
u;i
t)(1)
hi+1
v=U(mi+1
v;hi
v); (2)
wheredenotes learnable function parameters. Intuitively,
the state of a node, hv, is updated by aggregating the messages passed from its neighbours. Finally, after I1iterations of message passing, a readout function, R, uses the
updated node features for the classiﬁcation task of interest
y=R(fhi
vgjv2G): (3)
As illustrated in Fig. 2, our graph consists of a set of
“Foreground” nodes, F=ff1;f2;:::;fngand “Context”


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“Foreground” nodes, F=ff1;f2;:::;fngand “Context”
nodes,C=fc1;c2;:::;cmgwherenandmvary for each
video. The “Foreground” nodes, F, have readout and loss
functions associated with them, and correspond to the objects that will subsequently be classiﬁed. For the task of action recognition,Fcorresponds to bounding boxes of each
actor in the keyframe. Whilst for scene graph prediction, F
refers to bounding boxes for all potential objects of interest. The “Context” nodes, C, capture additional information
extracted from the scene for relational reasoning. The representations of these nodes, and their spatial connectivity,
are detailed next.
3.2. Spatial Model
The spatial connections in our graph model relationships between actors, objects and scene context in the same
frame. For example, recognising an action such as “give
object to a person” in the A V A dataset [17] requires understanding both people involved in the action and also the object being transferred.
To model such interactions, we ﬁrst represent the foreground nodes of our model, F, by extracting convolutional features from the last layer of the network, X2


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To model such interactions, we ﬁrst represent the foreground nodes of our model, F, by extracting convolutional features from the last layer of the network, X2
Rthwc, and using ROI-Align [19] followed by spatiotemporal pooling and a linear projection to obtain fi2Rd.
We model scene context by considering the features from
each spatial position in the feature map, X, as a contextual
node,ci, in our graph. Note that these features are projected
toRd. A similar representation was used by [54], which we
refer to as an implicit object model as it enables the network
to encode information about the scene and relevant objects
without any extra supervision. This approach is also known
as “grid features” in visual question answering [4, 24].
It is also possible to augment our set of contextual nodes
with an explicit object representation by computing classagnostic object proposals with a Region Proposal Network
(RPN) [46]. We use an RPN pretrained on the OpenImages
dataset [31] and obtain a d-dimensional feature from each
proposal by using ROI-Align and a linear projection as for
the foreground nodes. A similar idea of using explicit object
representations in video has also been employed by [3] and


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the foreground nodes. A similar idea of using explicit object
representations in video has also been employed by [3] and
[60], though not for spatio-temporal action recognition.
Messages are then computed and passed to foreground
nodes from both foreground and contextual nodes in the
graph. We only update the foreground nodes during message passing, as these are the nodes which are subsequently
classiﬁed in the ﬁnal Readout phase. Concretely, the spatial
neighbourhood for each foreground node in our graph is
Sv=F[C8v2F: (4)
ContextForegroundFrames
⚫
⚫
⚫𝜏"𝜏#Figure 3: Illustration of temporal connectivity. Foreground (blue)
and context (green) nodes have initial states computed from spatiotemporal features over tframes (shaded in yellow), centred on
a keyframe (denoted by a black circle). scontrols the distance
between selected keyframes; cis the total number of keyframes
considered. Here, c= 3,s= 7frames andt= 5 frames.
3.3. Temporal Model
We also include temporal connections in our graph to
model long-range interactions between actors and objects.


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3.3. Temporal Model
We also include temporal connections in our graph to
model long-range interactions between actors and objects.
As shown in Fig. 1, understanding actions often requires
reasoning about actors who are no longer visible in the current frame, thus requiring large temporal contexts.
We model these temporal interactions by connecting
foreground nodes in keyframe twith all other foreground
nodes in neighbouring keyframes t02T . Concretely, we
deﬁne the temporal context, c, and temporal stride, s, hyperparameters. As shown in Fig. 3, cis the total number of
number of keyframes in the video which we consider in our
temporal graph. sis the sampling rate at which we select
keyframes, as s1allows us to consider a wider temporal
interval in a more computationally efﬁcient manner. This is
necessary to train the entire model end-to-end. Moreover,
as each foreground feature node in the graph, fi, is itself
a spatio-temporal feature computed over a period of tby
a 3D CNN, selecting adjacent keyframes (and effectively
settings= 1 keyframe) could result in redundant information being captured by the temporal connections in the


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a 3D CNN, selecting adjacent keyframes (and effectively
settings= 1 keyframe) could result in redundant information being captured by the temporal connections in the
graph. Note that our deﬁnition of keyframe follows common datasets [17, 23] as a frame we aim to classify given
surrounding temporal context.
More formally, we can describe the neighbourhood of
each foreground node, v, for temporal message passing as
Tv=bc=2c[
dt=c=2eFts: (5)
Here, we use the superscript to denote the temporal index,
and without loss of generality consider t= 0 to be the
centre keyframe, meaning that negative time indices correspond to frames in the past. We set cto be an odd, positive
integer to employ an equal-sized temporal window on either
side of the centre keyframe.
We ﬁrst perform spatial message passing, before passing messages temporally. This allows information from the
context nodes in frame t0,ct0
j, to efﬁciently propagate to a
foreground node ft
i(wheret6=t0) viaft0
j, as the foreground
nodes are fully-connected temporally.
The following section now describes the messages that
are passed along the graph described above.


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j, as the foreground
nodes are fully-connected temporally.
The following section now describes the messages that
are passed along the graph described above.
3.4. Message Passing Functions
We ﬁrst observe that the Non-local operator or selfattention [56, 59] can be considered as a message passing
function in a fully-connected graph, where each node, hv,
is an element in the input feature map, H, and the neighbourhood comprises of all other feature elements. And
since self-attention is employed with a residual connection [59, 56] and layer normalisation [2, 56], the update
function of Non-local when viewed as an MPNN is
U=LN(hv+Self-Attention (H)): (6)
Similar analysis [5, 13] has shown that Graph Attention
Networks (GAT) [57], Relational Networks [47] and many
other graph neural networks [48, 29, 35, 4] can also be interpreted as MPNNs. In this paper, we consider Non-local [59]
and Graph Attention (GAT) [57] as message passing functions within the update function, Eq. (6).
Non-local We modify Non-local [59] to pass messages
from all Foreground and Context nodes to only Foreground


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Non-local We modify Non-local [59] to pass messages
from all Foreground and Context nodes to only Foreground
nodes (Eq. 4), as these are the nodes which are used for the
ﬁnal classiﬁcation in the Readout phase,
M=SoftmaxQK>
p
d
V (7)
Q=AWqK= [AjjC]WkV= [AjjC]Wv:
Here,A2RndandC2Rmdare matrices where each
row is a foreground and context feature node respectively,
Mis theRndmatrix of messages received by each node in
A,[AjjC]denotes the concatenation of these matrices and
Wq,WkandWvare learnable ddprojection matrices.
Graph attention (GAT) The graph attention [57] message for a node vis computed as
mv=0
@X
j2NvijWahj1
A (8)
ij=Softmax

w>
b[hijjhj]
(9)
whereis a ReLU non-linearity and Waandwbare a
learnable matrix and vector respectively.


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b[hijjhj]
(9)
whereis a ReLU non-linearity and Waandwbare a
learnable matrix and vector respectively.
Parallel messages It is also possible to compute multiple
incoming messages in parallel for a node, hv. When usingmultiple Non-local or Graph Attention functions, this corresponds to multi-headed attention [56, 57]. By viewing Nonlocal and GAT as message passing functions, we can also
aggregate messages from a combination of these two. In
these cases, we aggregate the messages using an attentionweighted convex combination, as performed in Eq. (9).
3.5. Readout Function
AfterI1iterations of message passing, a readout
function is applied on the Foreground nodes to obtain the
ﬁnal predictions. For action detection, the readout function is a linear classiﬁer operating on each element of F,
where each foreground node, fi, corresponds to the features
of an actor in the keyframe. For scene graph prediction, the
readout function consists of two classiﬁers: The ﬁrst linear
classiﬁer predicts the object-class label of each foreground
node. The second is a function of each pair of foreground
nodes, and predicts the relationship label between them.
3.6. Discussion


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node. The second is a function of each pair of foreground
nodes, and predicts the relationship label between them.
3.6. Discussion
We note that many previous structured models for video
understanding can be considered as special cases of our proposed MPNN framework:
Girdhar et al . [14] only consider a spatial model, i.e.
N=S, using implicit objects and Non-local [60] for
message passing. ACRN [54] has the same graph structure, but uses Relational Networks [47] for message passing instead. LFB [61], in contrast, considers only a temporal model, i.e.N=T, using Non-local as the message passing function in a graph that is fully-connected in
time. However, [61] do not consider a spatial model to capture interactions between actors in the keyframe. Zhang et
al. [71], on the other hand, model both temporal and spatial connections. However, they effectively model three
separate graphs: the ﬁrst models actors in short, 3-second
tubelets using GCN [29] for message passing. The other
two graphs model actor-actor and actor-object relations using a message passing method similar to GAT [57], but using a hand-deﬁned weighting function rather than a learned


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two graphs model actor-actor and actor-object relations using a message passing method similar to GAT [57], but using a hand-deﬁned weighting function rather than a learned
one as in GAT (Eq. 9). Wang et al. [60] also model a spatiotemporal graph, using GCN for message passing, and an explicit object representation in the spatial model. However,
their temporal connections are only among adjacent frames,
which does not allow information propagation between all
frames in long sequences, in contrast to our model which
is fully-connected temporally. With our uniﬁed framework,
we study the effect of graph modelling design choices and
show how we outperform previous work next in Sec. 4.
4. Experiments
We evaluate our method’s ability to model spatiotemporal interactions with experiments on spatio-temporal
action detection and video scene graph classiﬁcation.
Table 1: Ablation study on Action Genome using a 3D ResNet 50 backbone. We report the effect of (a) different message passing functions,
(b) temporal connections in the graph ( c= 1;s= 1corresponds to only spatial message passing) and (c) iterations of message passing.
(a) Spatial message passing functions
SGCls PredCls


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(a) Spatial message passing functions
SGCls PredCls
R@20 R@50 R@10 R@20
Baseline 48.9 51.3 78.7 93.8
Non-local in backbone 49.1 51.4 78.8 93.9
Non-local 50.4 52.6 79.3 94.2
GAT 51.1 53.2 79.7 94.4
GAT + Non-local 51.3 53.4 79.4 94.3(b) Temporal message passing
Temporal parameters SGCls PredCls
cs R@20 R@50 R@10 R@20
1 1 51.1 53.2 79.7 94.4
3 2 52.9 55.0 79.4 94.2
3 5 53.3 55.5 79.4 94.2
3 7 53.5 55.7 79.3 94.2
5 2 53.4 55.5 79.4 94.2
5 5 53.8 56.0 79.3 94.2
5 7 53.6 55.8 79.3 94.2(c) Message passing iterations
Iterations R@20
1 51.1
2 51.6
3 51.6
5 51.8
Spatio-temporal action recognition We evaluate on


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Iterations R@20
1 51.1
2 51.6
3 51.6
5 51.8
Spatio-temporal action recognition We evaluate on
A V A [17], the largest dataset for this task consisting of
15-minute video clips obtained from movies, and UCF10124 [53], the previous standard benchmark for this task. A V A
is labelled with atomic actions, where one person is typically performing multiple actions simultaneously, whilst actors perform only a single high-level action in UCF101-24.
We follow standard protocol and evaluate using the Frame
AP at an IoU threshold of 0.5 on both datasets. For A V A, we
use v2.2 annotations for ablations, and either v2.1 or v2.2
annotations for fair comparisons with prior work.
Video scene graph prediction We evaluate on the recent Action Genome dataset [23], which adds scene graph
annotations to Charades [49], on two scene graph tasks:
scene graph classiﬁcation (SGCls) and predicate classiﬁcation (PredCls). Both tasks are evaluated using the standard
Recall@K metric [39, 23] (R@K) which measures the fraction of ground truth relationship triplets (subject-predicateobject) that appear in the top K scoring predicted triplets. In


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SGCls, ground truth bounding box co-ordinates are given,
and the aim is to predict their object classes, as well as relationship labels between pairs of objects. PredCls is simpler,
as both bounding box co-ordinates and object classes are
given, and only the relationship label must be predicted.
Implementation details We use the public implementation of SlowFast [11] as our baseline with the 3D ResNet
50 or ResNet 101 backbones [20], as it is the current stateof-the-art. The network is similar to Fast-RCNN [15] as it
uses external region proposals to extract features from the
last feature map of res 5using ROI-Align [19]. These features are then spatio-temporally pooled and classiﬁed.
In our graph model, we initialise the internal states, hi,
of our Foreground nodes using these ROI-Aligned res 5features. For our action detection experiments, the Foreground
nodes in our graph correspond to bounding boxes of actors,
and we use the same person detector as [11, 61] for our actor region proposals. For scene graph experiments, we use
ground truth boxes of people and objects as our Foreground
nodes as we evaluate scene graph classiﬁcation (SGCls) and


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ground truth boxes of people and objects as our Foreground
nodes as we evaluate scene graph classiﬁcation (SGCls) and
predicate classiﬁcation (PredCls).Unless otherwise speciﬁed, we use SlowFast 88which
corresponds to 32 input frames where the video is subsampled by a factor of 2. This means that each feature node,
hi, in the graph aggregates t= 2:1seconds of temporal
information on A V A as the videos are sampled at 30 frames
per second (fps). As keyframes in A V A are deﬁned at 1 fps,
it means that we need to set s2keyframes for the temporal information captured by temporally-adjacent nodes in
the graph to not overlap. For Action Genome, the Charades
videos are sampled at 24 fps and the keyframes are on average 0.85 seconds, or 20.5 frames apart.
We train our network for 20 epochs using synchronous
SGD on 8 GPUs and a total batch size of 64, initialising from a Kinetics-400 [28] pretrained model. The baseline model in all our experiments is SlowFast without any
graph module trained in an identical manner. When training
spatio-temporal graph models, we ﬁnetune for 10 epochs


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graph module trained in an identical manner. When training
spatio-temporal graph models, we ﬁnetune for 10 epochs
from a model trained with only a spatial graph and reduce
the batch size by a factor of c. We also “freeze” batch
normalisation statistics as they have high variance for small
batches [19]. Full training details are in the appendix.
4.1. Experiments on video scene graph prediction
Spatial message passing We ﬁrst ablate only the spatial component (Sec. 3.2) of our model in Tab. 1a. Graph
Attention (GAT) [57] performs slightly better than Nonlocal [56, 59] as a message passing function, and we obtain
a further small improvement by combining the two methods
in parallel (Sec. 3.4). Overall, we improve upon our baseline model, which is SlowFast based on ResNet 50 without
any graph modelling, by 2.4 points for R@20 on SGCls.
Another baseline is to insert a Non-Local layer [59] after the ﬁnal res 5layer and before the ROI-Align layer, since
Non-local can also be viewed as a graph network (Sec. 3.4).


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Non-local can also be viewed as a graph network (Sec. 3.4).
In this case, the Foreground and Context nodes are not explicitly modelled as in our method and the overall performance is 2.2 points less than our method for the R@20 of
SGCls. This suggests that explicit modelling of the Foreground nodes which are subsequently classiﬁed is important to performance. We note, however, that Non-Local [59]
is typically employed earlier in a network ( i.e. in res 3or
res4[59, 61, 11]) and can thus be seen as a complementary
Table 2: Comparison to existing methods on the Action Genome
dataset [23]. Previous methods reported by [23].
SGCls PredCls
R@20 R@50 R@10 R@20
MSDN [34] 44.0 47.2 – –
IMP [64] 44.1 47.4 – –
RelDN [69] 46.7 49.4 – –
SlowFast (ResNet 50) 48.9 51.3 78.7 93.8
Ours (ResNet 50) 53.8 56.0 79.3 94.2
personsofacouch
table
laptopnot looking atnot contacting
not contactingnot looking at
not contacting
in front of
looking aton the side of


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personsofacouch
table
laptopnot looking atnot contacting
not contactingnot looking at
not contacting
in front of
looking aton the side of
in front of
person
sofacouchtelevision
laptop
table
not looking atnot contactingin front of
not contacting
behindlooking at
not looking atbeneathlooking at
in front of
sitting on
on the side ofabove
touching
Figure 4: Example scene graph predictions for consecutive
keyframes of Action Genome [23]. Classiﬁed bounding boxes are
on top, and the corresponding scene graph (objects are shown as
coloured rectangles, and relations with light-blue ovals) below.
method to improve features learned by the network.
Temporal message passing Table 1b adds temporal connections (Sec. 3.3) to our model, using GAT for message
passing, as it outperformed Non-local in Tab. 1a. We observe consistent improvements for a wide range of temporal
contexts,c, and strides, s, showing the utility of modelling
temporal dynamics. We improve over a graph with only
spatial connections by as much as 2.7 points for R@20.
For a temporal model, another baseline to consider is
to simply increase the temporal information available to
the spatial-only graph model by increasing the number of


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For a temporal model, another baseline to consider is
to simply increase the temporal information available to
the spatial-only graph model by increasing the number of
frames at the input. When tripling the number of input
frames, the R@20 is 52.4, less than all variants of our temporal model with c= 3. Similarly, increasing input frames
by a factor of 5, the R@20 is 52.8, less than all our temporal models with c= 5. This improvement demonstrates the
beneﬁts of message passing on an explicit temporal graph.
Iterations of message passing Table 1c shows that the
model’s performance plateaus after 2 iterations of message
passing, where parameters are not tied across iterations.
Comparison to state-of-the-art Finally, we compare to
prior works in Tab. 2 which are single-image models evalu-Table 3: Analysis of message passing neighbourhood on A V A using SlowFast with a ResNet-50 backbone as the baseline. By varying the neighbourhood, we study the effect of object representations (implicit, explicit or none) and temporal connections. We
report the Frame mAP on the three types of action classes in A V A.
Message passing neighbourhood PoseHumanHumanHumanObjectAll
SlowFast baseline (none) 43.1 25.2 17.4 24.8


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Message passing neighbourhood PoseHumanHumanHumanObjectAll
SlowFast baseline (none) 43.1 25.2 17.4 24.8
Actors only 43.2 27.0 17.8 25.6
Implicit objects only 43.4 26.7 18.0 25.7
Explicit objects only 43.0 26.7 17.8 25.5
Actor + Implicit 43.4 26.8 18.3 25.9
Actor + Implicit + Explicit 43.7 27.0 18.4 26.1
Spatio-temporal 43.8 27.5 19.9 27.0
ated by [23]. Our SlowFast, ResNet 50 3D baseline outperforms these, showing the importance of using spatiotemporal features for this task. As Action Genome contains
videos of humans acting to scripts, there is temporal structure in the interactions between actors and objects in the
scene (Fig. 4). Our ﬁnal spatio-temporal graph structured
model improves substantially upon this baseline by 4.9 and
4.7 points for the R@20 and R@50 for SGCls respectively.
Our improvements over the baseline for PredCls are less, as
this task is easier and the performance is saturated.
4.2. Experiments on action recognition
Graph structure and object representation Table 3
compares the effect of changing the neighbourhood that


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this task is easier and the performance is saturated.
4.2. Experiments on action recognition
Graph structure and object representation Table 3
compares the effect of changing the neighbourhood that
passes messages to each foreground node that is subsequently classiﬁed. We report the performance across the
three types of action categories in A V A [17] – Pose, HumanHuman and Human-Object – to show the effect that different object representations (implicit, explicit or neither as
described in Sec. 3.2) and also temporal connections have.
Our SlowFast baseline does not model any explicit graph
and hence effectively performs no message passing. For
our A V A experiments, Foreground nodes in the graph correspond to bounding boxes of the actors in the scene, using
the same person detections as [61, 11]. Thus, in this section,
“Foreground” and “actor” nodes are used interchangeably.
We observe from the second row of Tab. 3 that passing messages only between actor nodes (and thus not modelling object interactions) provides an overall improvement
of 0.8 points. The largest gain, as expected, are for HumanHuman action classes, as these are the interactions modelled by passing messages between actor nodes in the graph.
When passing messages from implicit context nodes to
the actors (third row), we observe an improvement in all


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When passing messages from implicit context nodes to
the actors (third row), we observe an improvement in all
types of action classes, but primarily in Human-Human and
Human-Object classes. This is because implicit context
nodes encompass the entire feature map, and thus capture
information about the whole scene (as also shown in Fig. 5).
Modelling objects explicitly with external regional proTable 4: Comparison on A V A. We report the Mean AP using v2.1
and v2.2 annotations. All methods pretrained on Kinetics 400.
“Multiscale” refers to averaging results over three scales [61].
Method v2.1 v2.2
ACRN (S3D) [54] 17.4 –
Zhang et al. (R50) [71] 22.2 –
SlowFast baseline (R50) 24.5 24.8
Girdhar et al. (I3D) [14] 25.0 –
LFB (R50) [61] 25.8 –
Ours (R50) 26.5 27.0
Ours Multiscale (R50) 27.3 27.7
SlowFast baseline (R101) 26.3 26.7
LFB (R101) [61] 26.8 –
Ours (R101) 28.3 28.8


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SlowFast baseline (R101) 26.3 26.7
LFB (R101) [61] 26.8 –
Ours (R101) 28.3 28.8
LFB Multiscale (R101) [61] 27.7 –
Ours Multiscale (R101) 29.5 30.0
posals (fourth row) improves on the same action types as the
implicit object model, but performs marginally worse. This
suggests that our RPN trained on OpenImages [31] is unable
to detect the objects that are most discriminative of A V A actions. As object annotations are not provided in A V A, it is
not possible to evaluate the recall of our external region proposals on relevant objects. It is not clear if we should expect
more improvement from explicit objects, because although
previous works have considered implicit [14, 54, 71] and
explicit representations [3, 60], we are not aware of any that
have compared the two. Note that these explicit context
nodes also model Human-Human interactions as our RPN
is trained on people in OpenImages [31]. We obtain further
improvements by combining messages from actors, implicit
and explicit context nodes, as shown by the next two rows.
Finally, we evaluate our spatio-temporal model, which
passes messages from actors, implicit- and explicit-context


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and explicit context nodes, as shown by the next two rows.
Finally, we evaluate our spatio-temporal model, which
passes messages from actors, implicit- and explicit-context
nodes withc= 3ands= 3, corresponding to an overall
temporal window of 8.5 seconds. This model performs the
best, improving upon the baseline by 2.2 points, or a relative
improvement of 8.9%. In particular, the temporal connections help to improve on Human-Object action classes.
A V A is a long-tailed dataset, and the most common failure modes of all variants of our model are the classes with
few training examples. However, our model improves on
both head and tail classes with respect to the baseline. This,
and detailed per-class results, are in the appendix.
State-of-the-art-comparison on A V A Table 4 compares
to recent, published work on A V A. Our method builds upon
SlowFast [11] as the base architecture, and our graph model
shows substantial improvements with either a 3D ResNet 50
or ResNet 101 backbone. As discussed in Sec. 3.6, Girdharet al. [14] and LFB [61] can be considered as special


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or ResNet 101 backbone. As discussed in Sec. 3.6, Girdharet al. [14] and LFB [61] can be considered as special
cases of our graph model as they model only spatial andTable 5: Comparison to state-of-the-art on UCF101-24. We report
the Frame AP at 0.5 using the corrected annotations of [51].
Method Modality Mean AP
ACT [26] RGB + Flow 69.5
Song et al. [52] RGB + Flow 72.1
STEP [67] RGB + Flow 75.0
Guet al. [17] RGB + Flow 76.3
MOC [36] RGB + Flow 78.0
SlowFast (R50) RGB 76.6
SlowFast (R101) RGB 77.4
Ours (R50) RGB 78.6
Ours (R101) RGB 79.3
temporal edges respectively. Our method, which constructs
a spatio-temporal graph, outperforms both. Note that we
outperform LFB [61] across both ResNet 50 and ResNet
101 backbones. Zhang et al . [71] also model a spatiotemporal interactions, but employ three separate graphs
with a hand-crafted aggregation function which we also outperform with our single, coherent spatio-temporal graph.


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with a hand-crafted aggregation function which we also outperform with our single, coherent spatio-temporal graph.
State-of-the-art comparison on UCF101-24 Table 5
shows that we outperform recent, published work on
UCF101-24 [53], using either a 3D ResNet 50 or ResNet
101 backbone. We do so without using optical ﬂow as an
additional input modality, showing that our network can
capture temporal information without it. Moreover, the improvements obtained from our graph model are consistent
with our results on the Action Genome and A V A datasets.
Qualitative results We visualise the spatial and temporal messages received by an actor node in the graph, on the
A V A dataset, when using GAT as the message passing function. In particular, we visualise the attention weights, ijin
(9), on each implicit object node (Fig. 5) and actor in neighbouring keyframes (Fig. 6), for a given actor. We observe
that the network places more weight on graph nodes that are
intuitively consistent with the ﬁnal action prediction. For
example, in Fig. 5, the model focuses on the actor’s face
when his action is “talk to” and the other person’s face when
his action is “listen to”.


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when his action is “talk to” and the other person’s face when
his action is “listen to”.
5. Conclusion and Future Work
We have presented a novel spatio-temporal graph neural network framework to explicitly model interactions between actors, objects and their environment. Our formulation can model objects either implicitly or explicitly, and
generalises previous structured models for video understanding [14, 54, 61, 71]. Using our versatile approach, we
have achieved state-of-the-art results on two diverse tasks
across three datasets. Future work remains to harness explicit object representations more effectively on A V A.
(a)talk to (0.6), sit (0.92), watch person (0.81) (b)listen to person (0.9), watch person (0.89), sit (0.97) (c)carry/hold (1.0), sit(0.88)
Figure 5: Visualisation of spatial message passing when using implicit objects as detailed in Sec. 4.2. Note in (a) and (b) that the network
focuses on the selected actor (denoted by the green box on the left) when the action is “talk to”, and on the person speaking to him when


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focuses on the selected actor (denoted by the green box on the left) when the action is “talk to”, and on the person speaking to him when
the action is “listen to person”. Attention weights, ijare colour-coded according to the bar on the far right. Best viewed in colour.
talk to (0.85), watch a person (0.82), sit(0.51)
Figure 6: Visualisation of temporal graph as detailed in Sec. 4.2. We show the neighbours for the actor depicted by the red box in the
centre keyframe, colour-coding the respective boxes with their attention weights ( ij). Predicted action scores of the red actor are below,
and selected keyframes are s= 2:1seconds apart. Notice that the model focuses on the people 2 keyframes (4.2 seconds) on either side
of the actor to recognise that she is “talking to” and “watching” them.
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Appendix
In this appendix, we additional analysis on A V A (Sec. A)
and implementation details (Sec. B).
A. A V A per-class analysis
Figure 7 presents per-class results on A V A for our SlowFast baseline, spatial and spatio-temporal graph models
when using a ResNet-50 backbone. We additionally show
the number of examples in the training set. Our proposed
graph models improve on both head and tail classes in A V A.
In fact, the largest absolute improvements are observed on
tail classes such as “cut”, “swim” and “sing to”. However,
note that the absolute accuracy of each class is still correlated with the number of training examples. The classes
which all variants of our model perform the worst on, are


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note that the absolute accuracy of each class is still correlated with the number of training examples. The classes
which all variants of our model perform the worst on, are
the classes with the least training examples such as “point
to (an object)”, “take a photo” and “turn (eg a screwdriver)”.
To emphasise the long-tailed distribution of A V A, note that
“point to (an object)” has the fewest training examples (just
97), whilst “watch (a person)” has the most with 168 148.
B. Additional Implementation details
Person detections For our spatio-temporal action detection experiments, we use external person detections as our
actor region proposals like [11, 61]. For our experiments
on A V A, we use the person detections publicly released
by [11, 61] during both training and testing. More speciﬁcally, this is a Faster-RCNN [46] model, pretrained on Microsoft COCO [37] and then ﬁnetuned on the training set of
A V A [17], using Detectron [63].
For our experiments on UCF101-24 [53], we ﬁnetune a Faster-RCNN detector pretrained on COCO on the
UCF101-24 training set using Detectron.


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UCF101-24 training set using Detectron.
When training on both A V A and UCF101-24 datasets, we
use both ground-truth and predicted person bounding boxes.
Predicted bounding boxes are assigned labels by matching
them to ground-truth boxes using an IoU threshold of 0.75.
Predicted bounding boxes which do not match any ground
truth boxes act as negative examples for all action classes.
OpenImages object detector For our “explicit object
representation” experiments on A V A, we use the publicly
available Faster-RCNN detector trained on OpenImages
v41.
Optimiser hyperparameters We train our models following the settings of the publicly released SlowFast
code [11]. We train for 20 epochs using synchronous
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and a momentum of 0.9
1https://tfhub.dev/google/faster_rcnn/
openimages_v4/inception_resnet_v2/1on 8 Nvidia V100 (16 GB) GPUs. The learning rate was set
to 0.1, and reduced by a factor of 10 after 10 and 15 epochs
respectively. We employed a linear-warmup schedule for
the learning rate, increasing linearly from 1:25104to0:1


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respectively. We employed a linear-warmup schedule for
the learning rate, increasing linearly from 1:25104to0:1
in the ﬁrst 5 epochs. We also used a weight decay of 107.
An epoch is deﬁned as all the keyframes in the dataset.
Training loss functions For spatio-temporal action
recognition on A V A and UCF101-24, we use the binary
cross-entropy loss function. The loss function for a single
example is:
L(x;y) =1
CCX
iyilog ((xi))+(1yi) log (1(xi));
(10)
whereCis the number of classes, is the sigmoid activation function, x2RCdenotes the logits predicted by the
network and yi2f0;1gdenotes the binary ground truth for
theithclass.
For scene graph classiﬁcation, we use two loss functions:
One for predicting the object class of each bounding box
proposal, and another for predicting the relationship label
between each of theN(N1)
2pairs of object proposals. For
the former, we use the softmax cross-entropy, as each proposal can only be assigned a single object class. And for


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2pairs of object proposals. For
the former, we use the softmax cross-entropy, as each proposal can only be assigned a single object class. And for
the latter, we use the sigmoid cross-entropy, as there can
be multiple relationship labels between any pair of objects.
Concretely, the loss is
L(x;w;y;z ) =Lobject(x;y) +Lrel(w;z) (11)
Lobject(x;y) =1
NNX
iCX
jyijlog (Softmax (x)ij)(12)
Lrel(w;z) =2
N(N1)RNX
ii1X
jRX
rzijrlog ((wijr))
+ (1zijr) log (1(wijr)): (13)
Here,Nis the number of object proposals in the video clip,
Rthe number of relationship classes and Cthe number of
object classes. yis the one-hot, ground-truth object class label,zthe binary ground-truth relationship label, and xand
wdenote the object- and relationship-logits respectively.
On Action Genome [23], there are R= 25 relationship


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wdenote the object- and relationship-logits respectively.
On Action Genome [23], there are R= 25 relationship
classes, and C= 35 object classes. We set = 0:5during
training on Action Genome to prevent the object class loss
from dominating the overall loss (the softmax cross entropy
has a higher loss than the binary sigmoid cross entropy at
the start of training).
Multi-headed attention For the GAT [57] and NonLocal [59] message-passing functions used in the paper
Mean AP
Number of training examples
0.000.250.500.751.00
100100010000100000watch (a person)
stand
talk to (e.g. self a person a 
listen to (a person)
sit
carry/hold (an object)
walk
touch (an object)
bend/bow (at the waist)
lie/sleep
ride (e.g. a bike a car a horse)
run/jog
answer phone
dance
eat
smoke
fight/hit (a person)
drink
crouch/kneel
read
martial art
grab (a person)
watch (e.g. TV)
sing to (e.g. self a person a 
play musical instrument


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read
martial art
grab (a person)
watch (e.g. TV)
sing to (e.g. self a person a 
play musical instrument
open (e.g. a window a car 
drive (e.g. a car a truck)
hand clap
get up
hug (a person)
give/serve (an object) to (a 
close (e.g. a door a box)
write
sail boat
kiss (a person)
listen (e.g. to music)
hand shake
take (an object) from (a 
put down
lift/pick up
text on/look at a cellphone
lift (a person)
push (an object)
push (another person)
hand wave
pull (an object)
dress/put on clothing
fall down
climb (e.g. a mountain)
throw
jump/leap
enter
shoot
cut
take a photo
hit (an object)
work on a computer
turn (e.g. a screwdriver)
swim
point to (an object)
Baseline Spatial Spatio-temporal Training examplesFigure 7: Mean Average Precision for each action class on A V A, for the SlowFast baseline, spatial- and spatio-temporal graph models with


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a ResNet-50 backbone. The number of examples in the training set are shown with the blue line on the right, vertical axis. Note that a
logarithmic scale is used, as A V A has a long-tailed distribution of labels.
Table 6: Ablation study of the number of heads when using GAT
as the message passing function. Mean AP reported on A V A using
a ResNet-50 backbone.
Number of heads 1 2 3 4 5
Mean AP 25.4 25.8 25.9 25.9 25.9
(Sec 3.4), it is common to compute “multi-headed” attention [56]. In all experiments reported in the main paper,
we used 4 heads, as motivated by the ablation study using
GAT on the A V A dataset in Tab. 6. To combine the messages from each head, we performed an attention-weighted
convex combination as done in Eq. 9.
Multiscale testing We use three scales when performing
multiscale testing (as done in Table 3 of the main paper).
Speciﬁcally, we resize input video-clips so that the shortest
side is 224, 256 and 320 respectively.


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ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer
Anurag Arnab*Mostafa Dehghani*Georg Heigold Chen Sun Mario Lu ˇci´c†Cordelia Schmid†
Google Research
faarnab, dehghani, heigold, chensun, lucic, cordelias g@google.com
Abstract
We present pure-transformer based models for video
classiﬁcation, drawing upon the recent success of such models in image classiﬁcation. Our model extracts spatiotemporal tokens from the input video, which are then encoded by a series of transformer layers. In order to handle the long sequences of tokens encountered in video, we
propose several, efﬁcient variants of our model which factorise the spatial- and temporal-dimensions of the input. Although transformer-based models are known to only be effective when large training datasets are available, we show
how we can effectively regularise the model during training
and leverage pretrained image models to be able to train on
comparatively small datasets. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple
video classiﬁcation benchmarks including Kinetics 400 and
600, Epic Kitchens, Something-Something v2 and Moments
in Time, outperforming prior methods based on deep 3D


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video classiﬁcation benchmarks including Kinetics 400 and
600, Epic Kitchens, Something-Something v2 and Moments
in Time, outperforming prior methods based on deep 3D
convolutional networks. To facilitate further research, we
release code at https://github.com/google-research/scenic.
1. Introduction
Approaches based on deep convolutional neural networks have advanced the state-of-the-art across many standard datasets for vision problems since AlexNet [38]. At
the same time, the most prominent architecture of choice in
sequence-to-sequence modelling (e.g. in natural language
processing) is the transformer [68], which does not use convolutions, but is based on multi-headed self-attention. This
operation is particularly effective at modelling long-range
dependencies and allows the model to attend over all elements in the input sequence. This is in stark contrast to
convolutions where the corresponding “receptive ﬁeld” is
limited, and grows linearly with the depth of the network.
The success of attention-based models in NLP has recently inspired approaches in computer vision to integrate
transformers into CNNs [75, 7], as well as some attempts to
replace convolutions completely [49, 3, 53]. However, it is
*Equal contribution


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transformers into CNNs [75, 7], as well as some attempts to
replace convolutions completely [49, 3, 53]. However, it is
*Equal contribution
†Equal advisingonly very recently with the Vision Transformer (ViT) [18],
that a pure-transformer based architecture has outperformed
its convolutional counterparts in image classiﬁcation. Dosovitskiy et al. [18] closely followed the original transformer
architecture of [68], and noticed that its main beneﬁts
were observed at large scale – as transformers lack some
of the inductive biases of convolutions (such as translational equivariance), they seem to require more data [18]
or stronger regularisation [64].
Inspired by ViT, and the fact that attention-based architectures are an intuitive choice for modelling longrange contextual relationships in video, we develop several transformer-based models for video classiﬁcation. Currently, the most performant models are based on deep 3D
convolutional architectures [8, 20, 21] which were a natural extension of image classiﬁcation CNNs [27, 60]. Recently, these models were augmented by incorporating selfattention into their later layers to better capture long-range
dependencies [75, 23, 79, 1].


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dependencies [75, 23, 79, 1].
As shown in Fig. 1, we propose pure-transformer models for video classiﬁcation. The main operation performed
in this architecture is self-attention, and it is computed on
a sequence of spatio-temporal tokens that we extract from
the input video. To effectively process the large number of
spatio-temporal tokens that may be encountered in video,
we present several methods of factorising our model along
spatial and temporal dimensions to increase efﬁciency and
scalability. Furthermore, to train our model effectively on
smaller datasets, we show how to reguliarise our model during training and leverage pretrained image models.
We also note that convolutional models have been developed by the community for several years, and there are
thus many “best practices” associated with such models.
As pure-transformer models present different characteristics, we need to determine the best design choices for such
architectures. We conduct a thorough ablation analysis of
tokenisation strategies, model architecture and regularisation methods. Informed by this analysis, we achieve stateof-the-art results on multiple standard video classiﬁcation
benchmarks, including Kinetics 400 and 600 [35], Epic


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benchmarks, including Kinetics 400 and 600 [35], Epic
Kitchens 100 [13], Something-Something v2 [26] and Moments in Time [45].arXiv:2103.15691v2  [cs.CV]  1 Nov 2021
…1CLS032NPosition + Token EmbeddingMLP HeadClassFactorisedEncoderL×
K         V         Q Self-AttentionTransformer  Encoder MLPLayer Norm
Layer NormMulti-HeadDot-Product Attention
Embed to tokensFactorisedSelf-Attention
21NFactorisedDot-Product
●●●SpatialSpatial●●●TemporalTemporal
SpatialTemporalSpatialTemporal●●●SpatialTemporal●●●FuseSpatialTemporalFuse
●●●21N●●●21N●●●Figure 1: We propose a pure-transformer architecture for video classiﬁcation, inspired by the recent success of such models for images [18].
To effectively process a large number of spatio-temporal tokens, we develop several model variants which factorise different components
of the transformer encoder over the spatial- and temporal-dimensions. As shown on the right, these factorisations correspond to different
attention patterns over space and time.
2. Related Work


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attention patterns over space and time.
2. Related Work
Architectures for video understanding have mirrored advances in image recognition. Early video research used
hand-crafted features to encode appearance and motion
information [41, 69]. The success of AlexNet on ImageNet [38, 16] initially led to the repurposing of 2D image convolutional networks (CNNs) for video as “twostream” networks [34, 56, 47]. These models processed
RGB frames and optical ﬂow images independently before
fusing them at the end. Availability of larger video classiﬁcation datasets such as Kinetics [35] subsequently facilitated the training of spatio-temporal 3D CNNs [8, 22, 65]
which have signiﬁcantly more parameters and thus require
larger training datasets. As 3D convolutional networks require signiﬁcantly more computation than their image counterparts, many architectures factorise convolutions across
spatial and temporal dimensions and/or use grouped convolutions [59, 66, 67, 81, 20]. We also leverage factorisation
of the spatial and temporal dimensions of videos to increase
efﬁciency, but in the context of transformer-based models.
Concurrently, in natural language processing (NLP),


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of the spatial and temporal dimensions of videos to increase
efﬁciency, but in the context of transformer-based models.
Concurrently, in natural language processing (NLP),
Vaswani et al. [68] achieved state-of-the-art results by replacing convolutions and recurrent networks with the transformer network that consisted only of self-attention, layer
normalisation and multilayer perceptron (MLP) operations.
Current state-of-the-art architectures in NLP [17, 52] remain transformer-based, and have been scaled to web-scale
datasets [5]. Many variants of the transformer have also
been proposed to reduce the computational cost of selfattention when processing longer sequences [10, 11, 37,
62, 63, 73] and to improve parameter efﬁciency [40, 14].
Although self-attention has been employed extensively in
computer vision, it has, in contrast, been typically incorporated as a layer at the end or in the later stages of
the network [75, 7, 32, 77, 83] or to augment residualblocks [30, 6, 9, 57] within a ResNet architecture [27].


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the network [75, 7, 32, 77, 83] or to augment residualblocks [30, 6, 9, 57] within a ResNet architecture [27].
Although previous works attempted to replace convolutions in vision architectures [49, 53, 55], it is only very recently that Dosovitisky et al. [18] showed with their ViT architecture that pure-transformer networks, similar to those
employed in NLP, can achieve state-of-the-art results for
image classiﬁcation too. The authors showed that such
models are only effective at large scale, as transformers lack
some of inductive biases of convolutional networks (such
as translational equivariance), and thus require datasets
larger than the common ImageNet ILSRVC dataset [16] to
train. ViT has inspired a large amount of follow-up work
in the community, and we note that there are a number
of concurrent approaches on extending it to other tasks in
computer vision [71, 74, 84, 85] and improving its dataefﬁciency [64, 48]. In particular, [4, 46] have also proposed
transformer-based models for video.
In this paper, we develop pure-transformer architectures
for video classiﬁcation. We propose several variants of our


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transformer-based models for video.
In this paper, we develop pure-transformer architectures
for video classiﬁcation. We propose several variants of our
model, including those that are more efﬁcient by factorising the spatial and temporal dimensions of the input video.
We also show how additional regularisation and pretrained
models can be used to combat the fact that video datasets
are not as large as their image counterparts that ViT was
originally trained on. Furthermore, we outperform the stateof-the-art across ﬁve popular datasets.
3. Video Vision Transformers
We start by summarising the recently proposed Vision
Transformer [18] in Sec. 3.1, and then discuss two approaches for extracting tokens from video in Sec. 3.2. Finally, we develop several transformer-based architectures
for video classiﬁcation in Sec. 3.3 and 3.4.
3.1. Overview of Vision Transformers (ViT)
Vision Transformer (ViT) [18] adapts the transformer
architecture of [68] to process 2D images with minimal
changes. In particular, ViT extracts Nnon-overlapping image patches, xi2Rhw, performs a linear projection and
then rasterises them into 1D tokens zi2Rd. The sequence


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then rasterises them into 1D tokens zi2Rd. The sequence
of tokens input to the following transformer encoder is
z= [zcls;Ex1;Ex2;:::;ExN] +p; (1)
where the projection by Eis equivalent to a 2D convolution.
As shown in Fig. 1, an optional learned classiﬁcation token
zclsis prepended to this sequence, and its representation at
the ﬁnal layer of the encoder serves as the ﬁnal representation used by the classiﬁcation layer [17]. In addition, a
learned positional embedding, p2RNd, is added to the
tokens to retain positional information, as the subsequent
self-attention operations in the transformer are permutation
invariant. The tokens are then passed through an encoder
consisting of a sequence of Ltransformer layers. Each layer
`comprises of Multi-Headed Self-Attention [68], layer normalisation (LN) [2], and MLP blocks as follows:
y`=MSA (LN(z`)) +z`(2)
z`+1=MLP(LN(y`)) +y`: (3)
The MLP consists of two linear projections separated by a


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z`+1=MLP(LN(y`)) +y`: (3)
The MLP consists of two linear projections separated by a
GELU non-linearity [28] and the token-dimensionality, d,
remains ﬁxed throughout all layers. Finally, a linear classiﬁer is used to classify the encoded input based on zL
cls2Rd,
if it was prepended to the input, or a global average pooling
of all the tokens, zL, otherwise.
As the transformer [68], which forms the basis of
ViT [18], is a ﬂexible architecture that can operate on any
sequence of input tokens z2RNd, we describe strategies
for tokenising videos next.
3.2. Embedding video clips
We consider two simple methods for mapping a video
V2RTHWCto a sequence of tokens ~ z2
Rntnhnwd. We then add the positional embedding and
reshape into RNdto obtain z, the input to the transformer.
Uniform frame sampling As illustrated in Fig. 2, a
straightforward method of tokenising the input video is to
uniformly sample ntframes from the input video clip, embed each 2D frame independently using the same method


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straightforward method of tokenising the input video is to
uniformly sample ntframes from the input video clip, embed each 2D frame independently using the same method
as ViT [18], and concatenate all these tokens together. Concretely, ifnhnwnon-overlapping image patches are extracted from each frame, as in [18], then a total of ntnhnw
tokens will be forwarded through the transformer encoder.
Intuitively, this process may be seen as simply constructing
a large 2D image to be tokenised following ViT. We note
that this is the input embedding method employed by the
concurrent work of [4].
#!"Figure 2: Uniform frame sampling: We simply sample ntframes,
and embed each 2D frame independently following ViT [18].
!"
#
Figure 3: Tubelet embedding. We extract and linearly embed nonoverlapping tubelets that span the spatio-temporal input volume.
Tubelet embedding An alternate method, as shown in
Fig. 3, is to extract non-overlapping, spatio-temporal
“tubes” from the input volume, and to linearly project this to
Rd. This method is an extension of ViT’s embedding to 3D,


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“tubes” from the input volume, and to linearly project this to
Rd. This method is an extension of ViT’s embedding to 3D,
and corresponds to a 3D convolution. For a tubelet of dimensionthw,nt=bT
tc,nh=bH
hcandnw=bW
wc,
tokens are extracted from the temporal, height, and width
dimensions respectively. Smaller tubelet dimensions thus
result in more tokens which increases the computation.
Intuitively, this method fuses spatio-temporal information
during tokenisation, in contrast to “Uniform frame sampling” where temporal information from different frames is
fused by the transformer.
3.3. Transformer Models for Video
As illustrated in Fig. 1, we propose multiple transformerbased architectures. We begin with a straightforward extension of ViT [18] that models pairwise interactions between all spatio-temporal tokens, and then develop more
efﬁcient variants which factorise the spatial and temporal
dimensions of the input video at various levels of the transformer architecture.
Model 1: Spatio-temporal attention This model simply forwards all spatio-temporal tokens extracted from the
video, z0, through the transformer encoder. We note that
this has also been explored concurrently by [4] in their


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video, z0, through the transformer encoder. We note that
this has also been explored concurrently by [4] in their
“Joint Space-Time” model. In contrast to CNN architectures, where the receptive ﬁeld grows linearly with the
number of layers, each transformer layer models all pair…1CLSNPositional + Token EmbeddingTemporal + Token Embedding
Embed to tokens…1N2…1N…TTemporal Transformer EncoderMLP Head
Class…CLS100CLS0CLS0Spatial Transformer EncoderSpatial Transformer EncoderSpatial Transformer EncoderFigure 4: Factorised encoder (Model 2). This model consists of
two transformer encoders in series: the ﬁrst models interactions
between tokens extracted from the same temporal index to produce
a latent representation per time-index. The second transformer
models interactions between time steps. It thus corresponds to a
“late fusion” of spatial- and temporal information.
wise interactions between all spatio-temporal tokens, and it
thus models long-range interactions across the video from
the ﬁrst layer. However, as it models all pairwise interactions, Multi-Headed Self Attention (MSA) [68] has
quadratic complexity with respect to the number of tokens.


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quadratic complexity with respect to the number of tokens.
This complexity is pertinent for video, as the number of tokens increases linearly with the number of input frames, and
motivates the development of more efﬁcient architectures
next.
Model 2: Factorised encoder As shown in Fig. 4, this
model consists of two separate transformer encoders. The
ﬁrst, spatial encoder, only models interactions between tokens extracted from the same temporal index. A representation for each temporal index, hi2Rd, is obtained after Ls
layers: This is the encoded classiﬁcation token, zLs
clsif it was
prepended to the input (Eq. 1), or a global average pooling
from the tokens output by the spatial encoder, zLs, otherwise. The frame-level representations, hi, are concatenated
intoH2Rntd, and then forwarded through a temporal
encoder consisting of Lttransformer layers to model interactions between tokens from different temporal indices.
The output token of this encoder is then ﬁnally classiﬁed.
This architecture corresponds to a “late fusion” [34,


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The output token of this encoder is then ﬁnally classiﬁed.
This architecture corresponds to a “late fusion” [34,
56, 72, 46] of temporal information, and the initial spatial encoder is identical to the one used for image classiﬁcation. It is thus analogous to CNN architectures such
as [24, 34, 72, 86] which ﬁrst extract per-frame features, and then aggregate them into a ﬁnal representation
before classifying them. Although this model has more
transformer layers than Model 1 (and thus more parameters), it requires fewer ﬂoating point operations (FLOPs),
as the two separate transformer blocks have a complexity
ofO((nhnw)2+n2
t)compared toO((ntnhnw)2)of
Model 1.
Transformer Block xLK         V       Q MLPLayer Norm
Layer NormMulti-HeadAttention
K         V       Q Layer NormMulti-HeadAttention
Temporal Self-Attention BlockSpatial Self-Attention BlockToken embeddingPositional embeddingFigure 5: Factorised self-attention (Model 3). Within each transformer block, the multi-headed self-attention operation is factorised into two operations (indicated by striped boxes) that ﬁrst


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only compute self-attention spatially, and then temporally.
Model 3: Factorised self-attention This model, in contrast, contains the same number of transformer layers as
Model 1. However, instead of computing multi-headed
self-attention across all pairs of tokens, z`, at layerl, we
factorise the operation to ﬁrst only compute self-attention
spatially (among all tokens extracted from the same temporal index), and then temporally (among all tokens extracted from the same spatial index) as shown in Fig. 5.
Each self-attention block in the transformer thus models
spatio-temporal interactions, but does so more efﬁciently
than Model 1 by factorising the operation over two smaller
sets of elements, thus achieving the same computational
complexity as Model 2. We note that factorising attention
over input dimensions has also been explored in [29, 78],
and concurrently in the context of video by [4] in their “Divided Space-Time” model.
This operation can be performed efﬁciently by reshaping
the tokens zfromR1ntnhnwdtoRntnhnwd(denoted
byzs) to compute spatial self-attention. Similarly, the input


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byzs) to compute spatial self-attention. Similarly, the input
to temporal self-attention, ztis reshaped to Rnhnwntd.
Here we assume the leading dimension is the “batch dimension”. Our factorised self-attention is deﬁned as
y`
s= MSA(LN( z`
s)) +z`
s (4)
y`
t= MSA(LN( y`
s)) +y`
s (5)
z`+1= MLP(LN( y`
t)) +y`
t: (6)
We observed that the order of spatial-then-temporal selfattention or temporal-then-spatial self-attention does not
make a difference, provided that the model parameters are
initialised as described in Sec. 3.4. Note that the number
of parameters, however, increases compared to Model 1, as
there is an additional self-attention layer (cf. Eq. 7). We do
not use a classiﬁcation token in this model, to avoid ambiguities when reshaping the input tokens between spatial and
temporal dimensions.
Model 4: Factorised dot-product attention Finally, we


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temporal dimensions.
Model 4: Factorised dot-product attention Finally, we
develop a model which has the same computational complexity as Models 2 and 3, while retaining the same number
of parameters as the unfactorised Model 1. The factorisation of spatial- and temporal dimensions is similar in spirit
K         V       Q Self-Attention BlockLayer NormMulti-HeadDot-product AttentionConcatenateLinear
K             V                Q Scaled Dot-Product AttentionLinearLinearLinearSpatial HeadsK             V                Q Scaled Dot-Product AttentionLinearLinearLinearTemporal HeadsFigure 6: Factorised dot-product attention (Model 4). For half of
the heads, we compute dot-product attention over only the spatial
axes, and for the other half, over only the temporal axis.
to Model 3, but we factorise the multi-head dot-product attention operation instead (Fig. 6). Concretely, we compute
attention weights for each token separately over the spatialand temporal-dimensions using different heads. First, we
note that the attention operation for each head is deﬁned as
Attention( Q;K;V) = SoftmaxQK>
pdk
V: (7)
In self-attention, the queries Q=XW q, keys K=XW k,


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pdk
V: (7)
In self-attention, the queries Q=XW q, keys K=XW k,
and values V=XW vare linear projections of the input X
withX;Q;K;V2RNd. Note that in the unfactorised
case (Model 1), the spatial and temporal dimensions are
merged asN=ntnhnw.
The main idea here is to modify the keys and values for
each query to only attend over tokens from the same spatialand temporal index by constructing Ks;Vs2Rnhnwd
andKt;Vt2Rntd, namely the keys and values corresponding to these dimensions. Then, for half of the attention heads, we attend over tokens from the spatial dimension by computing Ys= Attention( Q;Ks;Vs), and for
the rest we attend over the temporal dimension by computingYt= Attention( Q;Kt;Vt). Given that we are only
changing the attention neighbourhood for each query, the
attention operation has the same dimension as in the unfactorised case, namely Ys;Yt2RNd. We then combine
the outputs of multiple heads by concatenating them and
using a linear projection [68], Y= Concat( Ys;Yt)WO.


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the outputs of multiple heads by concatenating them and
using a linear projection [68], Y= Concat( Ys;Yt)WO.
3.4. Initialisation by leveraging pretrained models
ViT [18] has been shown to only be effective when
trained on large-scale datasets, as transformers lack some of
the inductive biases of convolutional networks [18]. However, even the largest video datasets such as Kinetics [35],
have several orders of magnitude less labelled examples
when compared to their image counterparts [16, 39, 58]. As
a result, training large models from scratch to high accuracy
is extremely challenging. To sidestep this issue, and enable
more efﬁcient training we initialise our video models from
pretrained image models. However, this raises several practical questions, speciﬁcally on how to initialise parameters
not present or incompatible with image models. We nowdiscuss several effective strategies to initialise these largescale video classiﬁcation models.
Positional embeddings A positional embedding pis
added to each input token (Eq. 1). However, our video
models have nttimes more tokens than the pretrained image model. As a result, we initialise the positional embeddings by “repeating” them temporally from Rnwnhdto


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Rntnhnwd. Therefore, at initialisation, all tokens with
the same spatial index have the same embedding which is
then ﬁne-tuned.
Embedding weights, EWhen using the “tubelet embedding” tokenisation method (Sec. 3.2), the embedding ﬁlter
Eis a 3D tensor, compared to the 2D tensor in the pretrained model, Eimage. A common approach for initialising
3D convolutional ﬁlters from 2D ﬁlters for video classiﬁcation is to “inﬂate” them by replicating the ﬁlters along the
temporal dimension and averaging them [8, 22] as
E=1
t[Eimage;:::;Eimage;:::;Eimage]: (8)
We consider an additional strategy, which we denote as
“central frame initialisation”, where Eis initialised with zeroes along all temporal positions, except at the centre bt
2c,
E= [0;:::;Eimage;:::;0]: (9)
Therefore, the 3D convolutional ﬁlter effectively behaves
like “Uniform frame sampling” (Sec. 3.2) at initialisation,


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Therefore, the 3D convolutional ﬁlter effectively behaves
like “Uniform frame sampling” (Sec. 3.2) at initialisation,
while also enabling the model to learn to aggregate temporal
information from multiple frames as training progresses.
Transformer weights for Model 3 The transformer
block in Model 3 (Fig. 5) differs from the pretrained ViT
model [18], in that it contains two multi-headed self attention (MSA) modules. In this case, we initialise the spatial
MSA module from the pretrained module, and initialise all
weights of the temporal MSA with zeroes, such that Eq. 5
behaves as a residual connection [27] at initialisation.
4. Empirical evaluation
We ﬁrst present our experimental setup and implementation details in Sec. 4.1, before ablating various components
of our model in Sec. 4.2. We then present state-of-the-art
results on ﬁve datasets in Sec. 4.3.
4.1. Experimental Setup
Network architecture and training Our backbone architecture follows that of ViT [18] and BERT [17]. We consider ViT-Base (ViT-B, L=12,NH=12,d=768), ViT-Large


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(ViT-L,L=24,NH=16,d=1024 ), and ViT-Huge (ViT-H,
L=32,NH=16,d=1280 ), whereLis the number of transformer layers, each with a self-attention block of NHheads
Table 1: Comparison of input encoding methods using ViViT-B
and spatio-temporal attention on Kinetics. Further details in text.
Top-1 accuracy
Uniform frame sampling 78.5
Tubelet embedding
Random initialisation [25] 73.2
Filter inﬂation [8] 77.6
Central frame 79.2
and hidden dimension d. We also apply the same naming
scheme to our models (e.g., ViViT-B/16x2 denotes a ViTBase backbone with a tubelet size of hwt= 16162).
In all experiments, the tubelet height and width are equal.
Note that smaller tubelet sizes correspond to more tokens at
the input, and thus more computation.
We train our models using synchronous SGD and momentum, a cosine learning rate schedule and TPU-v3 accelerators. We initialise our models from a ViT image


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We train our models using synchronous SGD and momentum, a cosine learning rate schedule and TPU-v3 accelerators. We initialise our models from a ViT image
model trained either on ImageNet-21K [16] (unless otherwise speciﬁed) or the larger JFT [58] dataset. We implement our method using the Scenic library [15] and have released our code and models.
Datasets We evaluate the performance of our proposed
models on a diverse set of video classiﬁcation datasets:
Kinetics [35] consists of 10-second videos sampled at
25fps from YouTube. We evaluate on both Kinetics 400
and 600, containing 400 and 600 classes respectively. As
these are dynamic datasets (videos may be removed from
YouTube), we note our dataset sizes are approximately 267
000 and 446 000 respectively.
Epic Kitchens-100 consists of egocentric videos capturing daily kitchen activities spanning 100 hours and 90 000
clips [13]. We report results following the standard “action
recognition” protocol. Here, each video is labelled with a
“verb” and a “noun” and we therefore predict both categories using a single network with two “heads”. The topscoring verb and action pair predicted by the network form
an “action”, and action accuracy is the primary metric.


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an “action”, and action accuracy is the primary metric.
Moments in Time [45] consists of 800 000, 3-second
YouTube clips that capture the gist of a dynamic scene involving animals, objects, people, or natural phenomena.
Something-Something v2 (SSv2) [26] contains 220 000
videos, with durations ranging from 2 to 6 seconds. In contrast to the other datasets, the objects and backgrounds in
the videos are consistent across different action classes, and
this dataset thus places more emphasis on a model’s ability
to recognise ﬁne-grained motion cues.
Inference The input to our network is a video clip of 32
frames using a stride of 2, unless otherwise mentioned, similar to [21, 20]. Following common practice, at inference
time, we process multiple views of a longer video and aver-Table 2: Comparison of model architectures using ViViT-B as the
backbone, and tubelet size of 162. We report Top-1 accuracy on
Kinetics 400 (K400) and action accuracy on Epic Kitchens (EK).
Runtime is during inference on a TPU-v3.
K400 EKFLOPs
(109)Params
(106)Runtime
(ms)


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Runtime is during inference on a TPU-v3.
K400 EKFLOPs
(109)Params
(106)Runtime
(ms)
Model 1: Spatio-temporal 80.0 43.1 455.2 88.9 58.9
Model 2: Fact. encoder 78.8 43.7 284.4 115.1 17.4
Model 3: Fact. self-attention 77.4 39.1 372.3 117.3 31.7
Model 4: Fact. dot product 76.3 39.5 277.1 88.9 22.9
Model 2: Ave. pool baseline 75.8 38.8 283.9 86.7 17.3
Table 3: The effect of varying the number of temporal transformers,Lt, in the Factorised encoder model (Model 2). We report the
Top-1 accuracy on Kinetics 400. Note that Lt= 0corresponds to
the “average pooling baseline”.
Lt 0 1 4 8 12
Top-1 75.8 78.6 78.8 78.8 78.9
age per-view logits to obtain the ﬁnal result. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, we use a total of 4 views per video (as this


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age per-view logits to obtain the ﬁnal result. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, we use a total of 4 views per video (as this
is sufﬁcient to “see” the entire video clip across the various
datasets), and ablate these and other design choices next.
4.2. Ablation study
Input encoding We ﬁrst consider the effect of different
input encoding methods (Sec. 3.2) using our unfactorised
model (Model 1) and ViViT-B on Kinetics 400. As we pass
32-frame inputs to the network, sampling 8 frames and extracting tubelets of length t= 4 correspond to the same
number of tokens in both cases. Table 1 shows that tubelet
embedding initialised using the “central frame” method
(Eq. 9) performs well, outperforming the commonly-used
“ﬁlter inﬂation” initialisation method [8, 22] by 1.6%, and
“uniform frame sampling” by 0.7%. We therefore use this
encoding method for all subsequent experiments.
Model variants We compare our proposed model variants (Sec. 3.3) across the Kinetics 400 and Epic Kitchens


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encoding method for all subsequent experiments.
Model variants We compare our proposed model variants (Sec. 3.3) across the Kinetics 400 and Epic Kitchens
datasets, both in terms of accuracy and efﬁciency, in Tab. 2.
In all cases, we use the “Base” backbone and tubelet size of
162. Model 2 (“Factorised Encoder”) has an additional
hyperparameter, the number of temporal transformers, Lt.
We setLt= 4 for all experiments and show in Tab. 3 that
the model is not sensitive to this choice.
The unfactorised model (Model 1) performs the best
on Kinetics 400. However, it can also overﬁt on smaller
datasets such as Epic Kitchens, where we ﬁnd our “Factorised Encoder” (Model 2) to perform the best. We also
consider an additional baseline (last row), based on Model
2, where we do not use any temporal transformer, and simply average pool the frame-level representations from the
spatial encoder before classifying. This average pooling
baseline performs the worst, and has a larger accuracy drop
Table 4: The effect of progressively adding regularisation (each
row includes all methods above it) on Top-1 action accuracy on


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baseline performs the worst, and has a larger accuracy drop
Table 4: The effect of progressively adding regularisation (each
row includes all methods above it) on Top-1 action accuracy on
Epic Kitchens. We use a Factorised encoder model with tubelet
size162.
Top-1 accuracy
Random crop, ﬂip, colour jitter 38.4
+ Kinetics 400 initialisation 39.6
+ Stochastic depth [31] 40.2
+ Random augment [12] 41.1
+ Label smoothing [61] 43.1
+ Mixup [82] 43.7
16x8 16x4 16x2
Input tubelet size787980Top-1 Accuracy
16x8 16x4 16x2
Input tubelet size0.51.01.5TFLOPs
ViViT-B ViViT-L
(a) Accuracy (b) Compute
Figure 7: The effect of the backbone architecture on (a) accuracy
and (b) computation on Kinetics 400, for the spatio-temporal attention model (Model 1).
16x8 16x4 16x2
Input tubelet size72.575.077.580.0Top-1 Accuracy
16x8 16x4 16x2
Input tubelet size0.20.4TFLOPs


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16x8 16x4 16x2
Input tubelet size0.20.4TFLOPs
Spatio-temporal Factorised encoder Factorised self-attention Factorised dot-product
(a) Accuracy (b) Compute
Figure 8: The effect of varying the number of temporal tokens on
(a) accuracy and (b) computation on Kinetics 400, for different
variants of our model with a ViViT-B backbone.
on Epic Kitchens, suggesting that this dataset requires more
detailed modelling of temporal relations.
As described in Sec. 3.3, all factorised variants of our
model use signiﬁcantly fewer FLOPs than the unfactorised
Model 1, as the attention is computed separately over
spatial- and temporal-dimensions. Model 4 adds no additional parameters to the unfactorised Model 1, and uses the
least compute. The temporal transformer encoder in Model
2 operates on only nttokens, which is why there is a barely
a change in compute and runtime over the average pooling baseline, even though it improves the accuracy substantially (3% on Kinetics and 4.9% on Epic Kitchens). Finally, Model 3 requires more compute and parameters than
the other factorised models, as its additional self-attention


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the other factorised models, as its additional self-attention
block means that it performs another query-, key-, valueand output-projection in each transformer layer [68].
Model regularisation Pure-transformer architectures
such as ViT [18] are known to require large training
datasets, and we observed overﬁtting on smaller datasets
like Epic Kitchens and SSv2, even when using an ImageNet
pretrained model. In order to effectively train our modelsTable 5: The effect of spatial resolution on the performance of
ViViT-L/16x2 and spatio-temporal attention on Kinetics 400.
Crop size 224 288 320
Accuracy 80.3 80.7 81.0
GFLOPs 1446 2919 3992
Runtime 58.9 147.6 238.8
on such datasets, we employed several regularisation strategies that we ablate using our “Factorised encoder” model
in Tab. 4. We note that these regularisers were originally
proposed for training CNNs, and that [64] have recently
explored them for training ViT for image classiﬁcation.
Each row of Tab. 4 includes all the methods from the
rows above it, and we observe progressive improvements


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explored them for training ViT for image classiﬁcation.
Each row of Tab. 4 includes all the methods from the
rows above it, and we observe progressive improvements
from adding each regulariser. Overall, we obtain a substantial overall improvement of 5.3% on Epic Kitchens. We
also achieve a similar improvement of 5% on SSv2 by using all the regularisation in Tab. 4. Note that the Kineticspretrained models that we initialise from are from Tab. 2,
and that all Epic Kitchens models in Tab. 2 were trained
with all the regularisers in Tab. 4. For larger datasets like
Kinetics and Moments in Time, we do not use these additional regularisers (we use only the ﬁrst row of Tab. 4),
as we obtain state-of-the-art results without them. The appendix contains hyperparameter values and additional details for all regularisers.
Varying the backbone Figure 7 compares the ViViTB and ViViT-L backbones for the unfactorised spatiotemporal model. We observe consistent improvements in
accuracy as the backbone capacity increases. As expected,
the compute also grows as a function of the backbone size.
Varying the number of tokens We ﬁrst analyse the performance as a function of the number of tokens along the


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the compute also grows as a function of the backbone size.
Varying the number of tokens We ﬁrst analyse the performance as a function of the number of tokens along the
temporal dimension in Fig. 8. We observe that using smaller
input tubelet sizes (and therefore more tokens) leads to consistent accuracy improvements across all of our model architectures. At the same time, computation in terms of
FLOPs increases accordingly, and the unfactorised model
(Model 1) is impacted the most.
We then vary the number of tokens fed into the model
by increasing the spatial crop-size from the default of 224
to 320 in Tab. 5. As expected, there is a consistent increase
in both accuracy and computation. We note that when comparing to prior work we consistently obtain state-of-the-art
results (Sec. 4.3) using a spatial resolution of 224, but we
also highlight that further improvements can be obtained at
higher spatial resolutions.
Varying the number of input frames In our experiments
so far, we have kept the number of input frames ﬁxed at 32.
We now increase the number of frames input to the model,
thereby increasing the number of tokens proportionally.


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We now increase the number of frames input to the model,
thereby increasing the number of tokens proportionally.
Table 6: Comparisons to state-of-the-art across multiple datasets. For “views”, xydenotes xtemporal crops and yspatial crops. We
report the TFLOPs to process all spatio-temporal views. “FE” denotes our Factorised Encoder model.
(a) Kinetics 400
Method Top 1 Top 5 Views TFLOPs
blVNet [19] 73.5 91.2 – –
STM [33] 73.7 91.6 – –
TEA [42] 76.1 92.5 103 2.10
TSM-ResNeXt-101 [43] 76.3 – – –
I3D NL [75] 77.7 93.3 103 10.77
CorrNet-101 [70] 79.2 – 103 6.72
ip-CSN-152 [66] 79.2 93.8 103 3.27
LGD-3D R101 [51] 79.4 94.4 – –
SlowFast R101-NL [21] 79.8 93.9 103 7.02


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LGD-3D R101 [51] 79.4 94.4 – –
SlowFast R101-NL [21] 79.8 93.9 103 7.02
X3D-XXL [20] 80.4 94.6 103 5.82
TimeSformer-L [4] 80.7 94.7 13 7.14
ViViT-L/16x2 FE 80.6 92.7 11 3.98
ViViT-L/16x2 FE 81.7 93.8 13 11.94
Methods with large-scale pretraining
ip-CSN-152 [66] (IG [44]) 82.5 95.3 103 3.27
ViViT-L/16x2 FE (JFT) 83.5 94.3 13 11.94
ViViT-H/14x2 (JFT) 84.9 95.8 43 47.77(b) Kinetics 600
Method Top 1 Top 5
AttentionNAS [76] 79.8 94.4
LGD-3D R101 [51] 81.5 95.6
SlowFast R101-NL [21] 81.8 95.1
X3D-XL [20] 81.9 95.5


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SlowFast R101-NL [21] 81.8 95.1
X3D-XL [20] 81.9 95.5
TimeSformer-L [4] 82.2 95.6
ViViT-L/16x2 FE 82.9 94.6
ViViT-L/16x2 FE (JFT) 84.3 94.9
ViViT-H/14x2 (JFT) 85.8 96.5
(c) Moments in Time
Top 1 Top 5
TSN [72] 25.3 50.1
TRN [86] 28.3 53.4
I3D [8] 29.5 56.1
blVNet [19] 31.4 59.3
AssembleNet-101 [54] 34.3 62.7
ViViT-L/16x2 FE 38.5 64.1(d) Epic Kitchens 100 Top 1 accuracy
Method Action Verb Noun
TSN [72] 33.2 60.2 46.0
TRN [86] 35.3 65.9 45.4
TBN [36] 36.7 66.0 47.2
TSM [43] 38.3 67.9 49.0
SlowFast [21] 38.5 65.6 50.0


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TSM [43] 38.3 67.9 49.0
SlowFast [21] 38.5 65.6 50.0
ViViT-L/16x2 FE 44.0 66.4 56.8
(e) Something-Something v2
Method Top 1 Top 5
TRN [86] 48.8 77.6
SlowFast [20, 80] 61.7 –
TimeSformer-HR [4] 62.5 –
TSM [43] 63.4 88.5
STM [33] 64.2 89.8
TEA [42] 65.1 –
blVNet [19] 65.2 90.3
ViVIT-L/16x2 FE 65.9 89.9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Number of views767880Top-1 Accuracy
32 stride 2 64 stride 2 128 stride 2
Figure 9: The effect of varying the number of frames input to the
network and increasing the number of tokens proportionally. We
use ViViT-L/16x2 Factorised Encoder on Kinetics 400. A Kinetics
video contains 250 frames (10 seconds sampled at 25 fps) and the
accuracy for each model saturates once the number of equidistant


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video contains 250 frames (10 seconds sampled at 25 fps) and the
accuracy for each model saturates once the number of equidistant
temporal views is sufﬁcient to “see” the whole video clip. Observe how models processing more frames (and thus more tokens)
achieve higher single- and multi-view accuracy.
Figure 9 shows that as we increase the number of frames
input to the network, the accuracy from processing a single view increases, since the network incorporates longer
temporal context. However, common practice on datasets
such as Kinetics [21, 75, 42] is to average results over multiple, shorter “views” of the same video clip. Figure 9 also
shows that the accuracy saturates once the number of views
is sufﬁcient to cover the whole video. As a Kinetics video
consists of 250 frames, and we sample frames with a stride
of 2, our model which processes 128 frames requires just a
single view to “see” the whole video and achieve its maximum accuarcy.
Note that we used ViViT-L/16x2 Factorised Encoder
(Model 2) here. As this model is more efﬁcient it can process more tokens, compared to the unfactorised Model 1
which runs out of memory after 48 frames using tubelet


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which runs out of memory after 48 frames using tubelet
lengtht= 2 and a “Large” backbone. Models processingmore frames (and thus more tokens) consistently achieve
higher single- and multi-view accuracy, in line with our observations in previous experiments (Tab. 5, Fig. 8). Moroever, observe that by processing more frames (and thus
more tokens) with Model 2, we are able to achieve higher
accuracy than Model 1 (with fewer total FLOPs as well).
Finally, we observed that for Model 2, the number of
FLOPs effectively increases linearly with the number of input frames as the overall computation is dominated by the
initial Spatial Transformer. As a result, the total number
of FLOPs for the number of temporal views required to
achieve maximum accuracy is constant across the models.
In other words, ViViT-L/16x2 FE with 32 frames requires
995.3 GFLOPs per view, and 4 views to saturate multi-view
accuracy. The 128-frame model requires 3980.4 GFLOPs
but only a single view. As shown by Fig. 9, the latter model
achieves the highest accuracy.
4.3. Comparison to state-of-the-art
Based on our ablation studies in the previous section,


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achieves the highest accuracy.
4.3. Comparison to state-of-the-art
Based on our ablation studies in the previous section,
we compare to the current state-of-the-art using two of our
model variants. We primarily use our Factorised Encoder
model (Model 2), as it can process more tokens than Model
1 to achieve higher accuracy.
Kinetics Tables 6a and 6b show that our spatio-temporal
attention models outperform the state-of-the-art on Kinetics
400 and 600 respectively. Following standard practice, we
take 3 spatial crops (left, centre and right) [21, 20, 66, 75]
for each temporal view, and notably, we require signiﬁcantly fewer views than previous CNN-based methods.
We surpass the previous CNN-based state-of-the-art using ViViT-L/16x2 Factorised Encoder (FE) pretrained on
ImageNet, and also outperform [4] who concurrently proposed a pure-transformer architecture. Moreover, by initialising our backbones from models pretrained on the larger
JFT dataset [58], we obtain further improvements. Although these models are not directly comparable to previous work, we do also outperform [66] who pretrained on
the large-scale, Instagram dataset [44]. Our best model uses


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the large-scale, Instagram dataset [44]. Our best model uses
a ViViT-H backbone pretrained on JFT and signiﬁcantly advances the best reported results on Kinetics 400 and 600 to
84.9% and 85.8%, respectively.
Moments in Time We surpass the state-of-the-art by a
signiﬁcant margin as shown in Tab. 6c. We note that the
videos in this dataset are diverse and contain signiﬁcant label noise, making this task challenging and leading to lower
accuracies than on other datasets.
Epic Kitchens 100 Table 6d shows that our Factorised
Encoder model outperforms previous methods by a signiﬁcant margin. In addition, our model obtains substantial improvements for Top-1 accuracy of “noun” classes, and the
only method which achieves higher “verb” accuracy used
optical ﬂow as an additional input modality [43, 50]. Furthermore, all variants of our model presented in Tab. 2 outperformed the existing state-of-the-art on action accuracy.
We note that we use the same model to predict verbs and
nouns using two separate “heads”, and for simplicity, we do
not use separate loss weights for each head.


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nouns using two separate “heads”, and for simplicity, we do
not use separate loss weights for each head.
Something-Something v2 (SSv2) Finally, Tab. 6e shows
that we achieve state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy with our
Factorised encoder model (Model 2), albeit with a smaller
margin compared to previous methods. Notably, our Factorised encoder model signiﬁcantly outperforms the concurrent TimeSformer [4] method by 2.9%, which also proposes
a pure-transformer model, but does not consider our Factorised encoder variant or our additional regularisation.
SSv2 differs from other datasets in that the backgrounds
and objects are quite similar across different classes, meaning that recognising ﬁne-grained motion patterns is necessary to distinguish classes from each other. Our results suggest that capturing these ﬁne-grained motions is an area of
improvement and future work for our model. We also note
an inverse correlation between the relative performance of
previous methods on SSv2 (Tab. 6e) and Kinetics (Tab. 6a)
suggesting that these two datasets evaluate complementary
characteristics of a model.
5. Conclusion and Future Work
We have presented four pure-transformer models for


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suggesting that these two datasets evaluate complementary
characteristics of a model.
5. Conclusion and Future Work
We have presented four pure-transformer models for
video classiﬁcation, with different accuracy and efﬁciency
proﬁles, achieving state-of-the-art results across ﬁve popular datasets. Furthermore, we have shown how to effectively regularise such high-capacity models for training
on smaller datasets and thoroughly ablated our main design choices. Future work is to remove our dependence onimage-pretrained models. Finally, going beyond video classiﬁcation towards more complex tasks is a clear next step.
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Appendix
A. Additional experimental details
In this appendix, we provide additional experimental details. Section A.1 provides additional details about the regularisers we used and Sec. A.2 details the training hyperparamters used for our experiments.
A.1. Further details about regularisers
In this section, we provide additional details and list the
hyperparameters of the additional regularisers that we employed in Tab. 4. Hyperparameter values for all our experiments are listed in Tab. 7.
Stochastic depth Stochastic depth regularisation was
originally proposed for training very deep residual networks [31]. Intuitively, the outputs of a layer, `, are


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Stochastic depth Stochastic depth regularisation was
originally proposed for training very deep residual networks [31]. Intuitively, the outputs of a layer, `, are
“dropped out” with probability, pdrop(`)during training, by
setting the output of the layer to be equal to its input.
Following [31], we linearly increase the probability of
dropping a layer according to its depth within the network,
pdrop(`) =`
Lpdrop; (10)
where`is the index of the layer in the network, and Lis the
total number of layers.
Random augment Random augment [12] randomly applies data augmentation transformations sequentially to an
input example. We follow the public implementation1, but
modify the data augmentation operations to be temporally
consistent throughout the video (in other words, the same
transformation is applied on each frame of the video).
The authors deﬁne two hyperparameters for Random
augment, “number of layers” , the number of augmentation
transformations to apply sequentially to a video and “magnitude”, the strength of the transformation that is shared
across all augmentation operations. Our values for these
parameters are shown in Tab. 7.
Label smoothing Label smoothing was proposed by [61]


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across all augmentation operations. Our values for these
parameters are shown in Tab. 7.
Label smoothing Label smoothing was proposed by [61]
originally to regularise training Inception-v3. Concretely,
the label distribution used during training, ~y, is a mixture
of the one-hot ground-truth label, y, and a uniform distribution,u, to encourage the network to produce less conﬁdent
predictions during training:
~y= (1)y+u: (11)
There is therefore one scalar hyperparamter, 2[0;1].
1https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/
master/official/vision/beta/ops/augment.pyMixup Mixup [82] constructs virtual training examples
which are a convex combination of pairs of training examples and their labels. Concretely, given (xi;yi)and(xj;yj)
wherexidenotes an input vector and yia one-hot input label, mixup constructs the virtual training example,
~x=xi+ (1)xj
~y=yi+ (1)yj: (12)
2[0;1], and is sampled from a Beta distribution,


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~y=yi+ (1)yj: (12)
2[0;1], and is sampled from a Beta distribution,
Beta(;). Our choice of the hyperparameter is detailed
in Tab. 7.
A.2. Training hyperparameters
Table 7 details the hyperparamters for all of our experiments. We use synchronous SGD with momentum, a
cosine learning rate schedule with linear warmup, and a
batch size of 64 for all experiments. As aforementioned,
we only employed additional regularisation when training
on the smaller Epic Kitchens and Something-Something v2
datasets.
Table 7: Training hyperparamters for experiments in the main paper. “–” indicates that the regularisation method was not used at all. Values
which are constant across all columns are listed once. Datasets are denoted as follows: K400: Kinetics 400. K600: Kinetics 600. MiT:
Moments in Time. EK: Epic Kitchens. SSv2: Something-Something v2.
K400 K600 MiT EK SSv2
Optimisation
Optimiser Synchronous SGD
Momentum 0.9
Batch size 64
Learning rate schedule cosine with linear warmup
Linear warmup epochs 2.5


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Optimiser Synchronous SGD
Momentum 0.9
Batch size 64
Learning rate schedule cosine with linear warmup
Linear warmup epochs 2.5
Base learning rate 0.1 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.5
Epochs 30 30 10 50 35
Data augmentation
Random crop probability 1.0
Random ﬂip probability 0.5
Scale jitter probability 1.0
Maximum scale 1.33
Minimum scale 0.9
Colour jitter probability 0.8 0.8 0.8 – –
Rand augment number of layers [12] – – – 2 2
Rand augment magnitude [12] – – – 15 20
Other regularisation
Stochastic droplayer rate, pdrop[31] – – – 0.2 0.3
Label smoothing [61] – – – 0.2 0.3
Mixup[82] – – – 0.1 0.3


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2023-2-3
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding
with Speculative Sampling
Charlie Chen1, Sebastian Borgeaud1, Geoﬀrey Irving1, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau1, Laurent Sifre1and John
Jumper1
1All authors from DeepMind
We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer decoding by enabling the
generation of multiple tokens from each transformer call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that
the latency of parallel scoring of short continuations, generated by a faster but less powerful draft
model, is comparable to that of sampling a single token from the larger target model. This is combined
with a novel modiﬁed rejection sampling scheme which preserves the distribution of the target model
withinhardwarenumerics. WebenchmarkspeculativesamplingwithChinchilla,a70billionparameter
language model, achieving a 2–25decoding speedup in a distributed setup, without compromising
the sample quality or making modiﬁcations to the model itself.
Introduction
Scaling transformer models to 500B+ parameters has led to large performance improvements on
many natural language, computer vision and reinforcement learning tasks (Arnab et al., 2021; Brown


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Introduction
Scaling transformer models to 500B+ parameters has led to large performance improvements on
many natural language, computer vision and reinforcement learning tasks (Arnab et al., 2021; Brown
etal.,2020;Chowdheryetal.,2022;Dosovitskiyetal.,2020;Hoﬀmannetal.,2022;Raeetal.,2021).
However, transformer decoding remains a highly costly and ineﬃcient process in this regime.
Transformer sampling is typically memory bandwidth bound (Shazeer, 2019), so for a given set of
hardware, the time to generate a single token in transformer models is proportional to a ﬁrst order
approximationtothesizeofparametersandthesizeofthetransformermemory. Thesizeoflanguage
models also necessitates serving with model parallelism – adding communication overheads (Pope
et al., 2022) and multiplying resource requirements. Since each new token depends on the past,
many such transformer calls are required to sample a new sequence.
We present an algorithm to accelerate transformer sampling for latency critical applications, which
we call speculative sampling (SpS). This is achieved by:
1.Generating a short draft of length 𝐾. This can be attained with either a parallel model (Stern


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we call speculative sampling (SpS). This is achieved by:
1.Generating a short draft of length 𝐾. This can be attained with either a parallel model (Stern
et al., 2018) or by calling a faster, auto-regressive model 𝐾times. We shall refer to this model
as thedraft model , and focus on the case where it is auto-regressive.
2.Scoring the draft using the larger, more powerful model from we wish to sample from. We shall
refer to this model as the target model .
3.Using a modiﬁed rejection sampling scheme, accept a subset of the 𝐾draft tokens from left to
right, recovering the distribution of the target model in the process.
Intuitively, there are often sequences where the next token might be “obvious”. Therefore, if there is
strongagreementbetweenthedraftandtargetmodel’sdistributionsonagiventokenorsub-sequence
of tokens, this setup permits the generation of multiple tokens each time the target model is called .
We show that the expected acceptance rate of draft tokens is suﬃcient to oﬀset the overhead of the
Corresponding author(s): ccharlie@deepmind.com


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Corresponding author(s): ccharlie@deepmind.com
©2023 DeepMind. All rights reservedarXiv:2302.01318v1  [cs.CL]  2 Feb 2023
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
draftingprocessforlargelanguagemodels,resultinginaneﬀectiveandpracticalmethodforreducing
sampling latency without the need for modifying the target model or biasing the sample distribution.
Depending on the evaluation domain, SpS leads to a 2–25speedup when sampling from Chinchilla
(Hoﬀmann et al., 2022). Notably, the mean tokens per second with SpS often exceeds the idealised
ceiling on auto-regressive sampling speed imposed by the memory bandwidth.
Related Work
There has been a substantial body of work focused on improving sampling latency of large transformers and other auto-regressive models.
Since sampling performance is heavily coupled with the model size in memory, quantisation to
int8or even int4(Dettmers et al., 2022; Yao et al., 2022) and distillation (Jiao et al., 2020; Sanh
et al., 2019) of transformers are eﬀective techniques for reducing sampling latency with little to no


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et al., 2019) of transformers are eﬀective techniques for reducing sampling latency with little to no
performance penalty. The observation that model size contributes less to the ﬁnal performance than
expected (Hoﬀmann et al., 2022) has also encouraged smaller language models in general.
During sampling, a cache of the keys and values is maintained for every attention layer, and could
become a memory bandwidth bottleneck as the batch size increases. Methods such as multi-query
attention (Shazeer, 2019) aims to improve sampling performance by shrinking this cache. However
thesetechniquesaremosteﬀectiveatmaximisingthroughout(atlargerbatchsizes)insteadoflatency,
especially for larger models where the majority of the memory bandwidth budget is consumed by the
parameters.
Using a combination of the above techniques, in addition to a number of low-level optimisations to
TPUs, Pope et al. (2022) have greatly improved the serving latency and eﬃciency of PaLM 540B.
There is an existing body of similar work exploiting the eﬃciency of transformers and sequence
models operating in parallel. This includes block parallel sampling (Stern et al., 2018), aggressive
decoding (Ge et al., 2022), in addition to some work in parallelizing autoregressive models in the


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decoding (Ge et al., 2022), in addition to some work in parallelizing autoregressive models in the
image domain (Song et al., 2021; Wiggers and Hoogeboom, 2020). These methods have yet to be
adapted to typical language model use-cases since they either only work with greedy sampling, bias
the results or are focused on other modalities. Further, to our knowledge none of these techniques
have been scaled to distributed setups, which is necessary for the most expensive decoders with the
tens or hundreds of billions of parameters.
Coincidentally, the work in this manuscript was undertaken concurrently and independently of
the work on speculative decoding from Leviathan et al. (2022). We focus more heavily the distributed
serving setting for large models and oﬀer some incremental optimisations, but otherwise the core
underlying idea is the same.
Auto-regressive Sampling
Whilst transformers can be trained eﬃciently and in parallel on TPUs and GPUs, samples are typically
drawn auto-regressively (See algorithm 1). For most applications, auto-regressive sampling (ArS) is
highlymemorybandwidthboundandthuscannotmakeeﬀectiveuseofmodernacceleratorhardware
(Shazeer, 2019). A memory bound model call only generates a single token for every sequence in the


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(Shazeer, 2019). A memory bound model call only generates a single token for every sequence in the
batch, hence generating multiple tokens introduces a large amount of latency in any system which
makes use of it.
2
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
Thisisespeciallyproblematicasthenumberofparameters inthemodelincreases. Sinceallthemodel
parameters need to pass through at least one accelerator chip, the model size divided by the total
memory bandwidth across all chips gives us a hard ceiling on the maximum auto-regressive sampling
speed. Larger models also require serving on multiple accelerators, introducing a further source of
latency due to inter-device communication overheads.
Algorithm 1 Auto-regressive (ArS) with Auto-Regressive Models
Givenauto-regressivetargetmodel 𝑞¹jºandinitialpromptsequence 𝑥1𝑥𝑡andtargetsequence
length𝑇.
Initialise𝑛 𝑡.
while𝑛 𝑇do
Sample𝑥𝑛¸1𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛º


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𝑛 𝑛¸1
end while
Algorithm 2 Speculative Sampling (SpS) with Auto-Regressive Target and Draft Models
Given lookahead 𝐾and minimum target sequence length 𝑇.
Given auto-regressive target model 𝑞¹jº, and auto-regressive draft model 𝑝¹jº, initial prompt
sequence𝑥0𝑥𝑡.
Initialise𝑛 𝑡.
while𝑛 𝑇do
for𝑡=1 :𝐾do
Sample draft auto-regressively ˜𝑥𝑡𝑝¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛˜𝑥1 ˜𝑥𝑡1º
end for
In parallel, compute 𝐾¸1sets of logits from drafts ˜𝑥1 ˜𝑥𝐾:


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𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛º 𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛˜𝑥1º  𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛˜𝑥1 ˜𝑥𝐾º
for𝑡=1 :𝐾do
Sample𝑟𝑈»01¼from a uniform distribution.
if𝑟 min
1𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛¸𝑡1º
𝑝¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛¸𝑡1º
,then
Set𝑥𝑛¸𝑡 ˜𝑥𝑡and𝑛 𝑛¸1.


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,then
Set𝑥𝑛¸𝑡 ˜𝑥𝑡and𝑛 𝑛¸1.
else
sample𝑥𝑛¸𝑡¹𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛¸𝑡1º𝑝¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛¸𝑡1ºº¸and exit for loop.
end if
end for
If all tokens 𝑥𝑛¸1𝑥𝑛¸𝐾are accepted, sample extra token 𝑥𝑛¸𝐾¸1𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛𝑥𝑛¸𝐾ºand
set𝑛 𝑛¸1.
end while
Speculative Sampling
Conditional Scoring
For speculative sampling (See algorithm 2), we ﬁrst make the observation that computing the logits


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end while
Speculative Sampling
Conditional Scoring
For speculative sampling (See algorithm 2), we ﬁrst make the observation that computing the logits
of a short continuation of 𝐾tokens in parallel has a very similar latency to that of sampling a single
3
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
token. We focus our attention on large transformers, sharded in the Megatron style (Shoeybi et al.,
2019). For these models the majority of sampling time can be attributed to three components:
1.Linear Layers: For small batch sizes, each linear layer only processes a small number of
embeddings. This causes the dense matrix multiplies in the feed-forward layers, queries, keys,
values computations and the ﬁnal attention projection to become memory bound. For small 𝐾,
this will continue to be memory bound and therefore take a similar amount of time.
2.The Attention Mechanism: Theattentionmechanismisalsomemorybound. Duringsampling,
we maintain a cache of all the keys and values of the previous tokens in the sequence to avoid
re-computation. These KV-caches are large, and accounts for the majority of the memory


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re-computation. These KV-caches are large, and accounts for the majority of the memory
bandwidth utilisation for the attention mechanism. However, since the KV-cache size does not
change as we increase 𝐾, there is little to no delta in this component.
3.All-reduces: Asmodelsgrowinsize, itsparametersneedtobedividedacrossmultipleaccelerators, leading to communication overheads. With Megatron, this manifests itself as an all-reduce
after every feed-forward and attention layer. Since only the activations for a small number of
tokens are transmitted, this operation is typically latency bound instead of throughput bound
for both sampling and scoring (for small 𝐾). Again, this results in a similar amount of time
spent in the two cases.
Other sources of overhead may exist, depending on the exact transformer implementation. Therefore
it is still possible that the choice of positioning encoding, decoding method (e.g. a sort might be
required for nucleus sampling), hardware limitations etc. can introduce some deltas between scoring
and sampling. However, if the conditions are met such that the above components dominate then
scoring should not be signiﬁcantly slower for small 𝐾.
Modiﬁed Rejection Sampling


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scoring should not be signiﬁcantly slower for small 𝐾.
Modiﬁed Rejection Sampling
We require a method to recover the distribution of the target model from samples from the draft
model, and logits of said tokens from both models.
To achieve this, we introduce the following rejection sampling scheme of the drafted tokens. Given a
sequence of tokens 𝑥1𝑥𝑛, and𝐾draft tokens ˜𝑥𝑛¸1 ˜𝑥𝑛¸𝐾generated from 𝑝¹jº, we accept ˜𝑥𝑛¸1
with probability:
min
1𝑞¹˜𝑥𝑛¸1j𝑥1𝑥𝑛º
𝑝¹˜𝑥𝑛¸1j𝑥1𝑥𝑛º


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𝑝¹˜𝑥𝑛¸1j𝑥1𝑥𝑛º
Where𝑞¹˜𝑥𝑛¸1j𝑥1𝑥𝑛ºand𝑝¹˜𝑥𝑛¸1j𝑥1𝑥𝑛ºare the probability of ˜𝑥𝑛¸1according to the target and
draft models respectively, conditioned on the context so far.
If the token is accepted, we set 𝑥𝑛¸1 ˜𝑥𝑛¸1and repeat the process for ˜𝑥𝑛¸2until either a token
is rejected or all tokens have been accepted.
If˜𝑥𝑛¸1is rejected, we resample 𝑥𝑛¸1from the following distribution:


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If˜𝑥𝑛¸1is rejected, we resample 𝑥𝑛¸1from the following distribution:
𝑥𝑛¸1¹𝑞¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛º𝑝¹𝑥j𝑥1𝑥𝑛ºº¸
Where¹º¸denotes:
¹𝑓¹𝑥ºº¸=max¹0 𝑓¹𝑥ººÍ
𝑥max¹0 𝑓¹𝑥ºº
By applying this sequentially, we recover the distribution of the target model for the accepted tokens
(see proof in Theorem 1) within hardware numerics. Note that:
4
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
•At least one token will always be generated from a draft-accept loop – if the ﬁrst token is
rejected, a valid token is resampled.
•Since the ﬁnal token of the draft gives us the logits for the next token, if every drafted token is


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rejected, a valid token is resampled.
•Since the ﬁnal token of the draft gives us the logits for the next token, if every drafted token is
accepted, we can sample from it normally. This gives us a maximum of 𝐾¸1tokens per loop,
over the naive implementation which would only return 𝐾tokens.
With standard sampling methods such as nucleus, top-k sampling and adjusting temperature, we
can modify the probabilities accordingly before applying this rejection sampling scheme. We have
observed that the overall acceptance rate is robust to the exact parameters used.
Because we do not interact with the body of the transformer itself, this method can be used in
conjunction many other techniques for accelerating or optimising the memory use of sampling, such
as quantisation and multi-query attention.
Choice of Draft Models
Since the acceptance criterion guarantees the distribution of the target model in our samples, we are
free to choose the method for drafting a continuation as long as it exposes logits, and there is a high
enough acceptance rate and/or low enough latency to break-even. There exist several approaches
here:
•Incorporating draft generation into the target model, and train the model from the start. This
is the strategy used by Stern et al. (2018), which adds multiple heads into the transformer to


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is the strategy used by Stern et al. (2018), which adds multiple heads into the transformer to
generate multiple tokens.
•Using sequence level distillation (Kim and Rush, 2016) to generate a second model which
predicts𝐾tokens in parallel. This strategy was employed by Ge et al. (2022).
•Set a portion of the activations of the target model as an input to the draft model, and train the
draft model with this input.
Although these methods will likely yield powerful drafts, they require a large number of data generated from the target model or changes to the target model. Sequence level distillation in particular
would require a large compute budget. This makes them less practical for large scale applications.
Whilst large language models produce better samples, intuitively there are "easier" tokens to predict
for which smaller models may be suﬃcient. Therefore we may simply use a smaller version of the
target language model as the draft and obtain high acceptance rates. This would also be convenient
from an engineering and workﬂow perspective, since robust tooling for such models should already
exist to train the target model in the ﬁrst place.
Results
We train a 4 billion parameter draft model optimised for sampling latency on 16 TPU v4s – the same
hardware that is typically used to serve Chinchilla for research purposes. This model was trained


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hardware that is typically used to serve Chinchilla for research purposes. This model was trained
with the same tokeniser and dataset as Chinchilla, with a slightly smaller width and with only 8
layers. The relatively few number of layers allows it to achieve a sampling speed of 1.8ms/token
comparedto 14.1ms/token forChinchilla. Fordetails,pleaserefertothehyperparametersinTable2.
For distributed setups it is insuﬃcient to naively choose a small model as the draft, since diﬀerent models have diﬀerent optimal inference setups. For example, it is typical to serve Chinchilla 70B
5
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
Table1jChinchillaperformanceandspeedonXSumandHumanEvalwithnaiveandspeculative
sampling at batch size 1 and 𝐾=4. XSum was executed with nucleus parameter 𝑝=08, and
HumanEval with 𝑝=095and temperature 08.
Sampling Method Benchmark Result Mean Token Time Speed Up
ArS (Nucleus)XSum (ROUGE-2)0.112 14.1ms/Token 1


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Sampling Method Benchmark Result Mean Token Time Speed Up
ArS (Nucleus)XSum (ROUGE-2)0.112 14.1ms/Token 1
SpS (Nucleus) 0.114 7.52ms/Token 192
ArS (Greedy)XSum (ROUGE-2)0.157 14.1ms/Token 1
SpS (Greedy) 0.156 7.00ms/Token 201
ArS (Nucleus)HumanEval (100 Shot)45.1% 14.1ms/Token 1
SpS (Nucleus) 47.0% 5.73ms/Token 246
on 16 TPU v4s (where it achieves the aforementioned 14.1ms/token ), whereas a chinchilla-optimal
7B achieves its lowest sampling latency on 4 TPU v4s (where it achieves 5ms/token ). For smaller
models, the additional memory bandwidth and ﬂops are insuﬃcient to oﬀset the additional communication overhead between more devices – serving a 7B on 16 TPUs actually increases the latency. This
means the 7B would provide only a modest speedup if used as a draft with its optimal topology, and


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means the 7B would provide only a modest speedup if used as a draft with its optimal topology, and
we will not make full utilisation of the hardware during drafting.
We can sidestep this issue by training a wider model with a relatively few number of layers in
order to minimise communication overhead. It has been observed that the performance of language
models is relatively robust to changes in model aspect ratio (Levine et al., 2020), so this allows us
to serve a powerful draft model which can be sampled rapidly on the same hardware as the target
model.
Evaluation on XSum and HumanEval
We evaluate speculative sampling with Chinchilla on two tasks and summarize the results in Table 1:
•The XSum (Narayan et al., 2018) benchmark. This is a natural language summarisation task
using a 1-shot prompt where we sample a total of 11,305 sequences with a maximum sequence
length 128.
•The 100-shot HumanEval task (Chen et al., 2021). This is a code generation task involves the
generation of 16,400 samples with a maximum sequence length of 512.
Even with greedy sampling, a single token deviating due to numerics could result in two sequences
diverging wildly. Since pseudo-random seeds are processed diﬀerently between ArS and SpS, and


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diverging wildly. Since pseudo-random seeds are processed diﬀerently between ArS and SpS, and
because the diﬀerent computation graphs lead to diﬀerent numerics, we cannot not expect identical
outputs. However, we expect the samples to come from the same distribution within numerics and
we empirically verify this by evaluating these benchmarks.
We run the tasks at batch size 1 with SpS and ArS. The time taken per SpS/ArS loop has low
variance, and we can measure it directly from TPU proﬁles. To obtain the average speedup, standard
deviations and other metrics, we log the amount of tokens generated for each speculative loop. In
Table 1 we show the performance on the XSum and HumanEval benchmarks for naive and speculative
sampling with Chinchilla.
6
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
We obtain a substantial speedup in both tasks, with HumanEval reaching speedups of almost 25.
Yet, we have parity in the benchmark metrics – the underlying samples distribution is provably the
sameuptonumerics, andthisveriﬁesthatthedraftmodelisnotbiasingtheresultsempirically. Inthe
case of HumanEval and greedy XSum, this speedup exceeded the theoretical memory bandwidth limit


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case of HumanEval and greedy XSum, this speedup exceeded the theoretical memory bandwidth limit
of the hardware for autoregressive sampling (model size divided by the total memory bandwidth).
Acceptance rate changes per domain
It is apparent that the acceptance rate is dependent on the application and the decoding method.
HumanEvalachievesasigniﬁcantlylargerspeedup—Wehypothesizethatthisisduetoacombination
of code containing a lot of common sub-sequences (e.g. for i in range(len(arr)): would be
relatively easy for a draft model to guess), is often decomposed into a smaller set of shorter tokens
and the temperature value sharpening both the draft and target logits.
01234567
Number of draft tokens (K)40060080010001200140016001800ms
Mean Sampling Time (128 tokens)
Human Eval
XSum
01234567
Number of draft tokens (K)0.50.60.70.80.91.0
Acceptance rate
Human Eval
XSum
01234567
Number of draft tokens (K)1416182022242628ms
Total loop time
Figure 1jLeft:The average time to generate 128 tokens, with standard deviation. Note that as 𝐾


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Total loop time
Figure 1jLeft:The average time to generate 128 tokens, with standard deviation. Note that as 𝐾
increases, the overall speedup plateaus or even regresses, with XSum being optimal at 𝐾=3. The
variance consistently increases with 𝐾.Middle:The average number of tokens accepted divided by
𝐾¸1– this serves as a measure of the overall eﬃciency of the modiﬁed rejection scheme, which
decreases with the lookahead. Right:Average time per loop increases approximately linearly with 𝐾
duetotheincreasednumberofmodelcalls. Notethatthegradientisslightlyhigherthanthesampling
speed of the draft model, due to additional overheads in nucleus decoding.
Trade oﬀ between longer drafts and more frequent scoring
Wevisualisethetrade-oﬀofincreasing 𝐾,thenumberoftokenssampledbythedraftmodelinFigure1.
As𝐾increases, we need fewer scoring calls from the large models to generate the same sequence
length, potentially giving us a larger speedup. However, the total loop time increases approximately
linearly with the larger number of draft model calls and small increases in the scoring time. The


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length, potentially giving us a larger speedup. However, the total loop time increases approximately
linearly with the larger number of draft model calls and small increases in the scoring time. The
overall eﬃciency of the proportion of accepted tokens decreases as 𝐾increases, since later tokens
depend on the acceptance of previous tokens. This results in the average speedup plateauing or
even degrading with a larger 𝐾(for example, XSum with nucleus’s latency is minimised at 𝐾=3),
depending on the domain.
7
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
Further, even though larger values of 𝐾may yield marginally greater mean speedups in certain
circumstances, it also increases variance of the time to generate a full sequence. This could be
problematic for settings where the P90, P99 latencies of concern.
Conclusion
Inthiswork,wedemonstrateanewalgorithmandworkﬂowforacceleratingthedecodingoflanguage
models. Speculative sampling does not require making any modiﬁcations to the target language
model’s parameters or architecture, is provably lossless within numerics, scales well with the appropriate draft model and complements many existing techniques for reducing latency in the small batch
size setting.


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size setting.
We optimise and scale the technique to Chinchilla 70B using a draft model which was easy to
trainwithexistinginfrastructure, demonstratingthatityieldsalargespeedupacrossbenchmarktasks
and common decoding methods in the process. We verify that it is indeed lossless empirically in its
downstream tasks.
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Supplementary Materials
Author Contributions
•Initial proposal: Charlie Chen, John Jumper and Geoﬀrey Irving
•Initial Implementation, Optimisation and Scaling: Charlie Chen
•Modiﬁed Rejection Sampling Scheme: John Jumper
•Engineering Improvements: Jean-Baptiste Lespiau and Charlie Chen
•Experiments: Charlie Chen, Sebastian Borgeaud and Laurent Sifre
•Draft of Manuscript: Charlie Chen and Sebastian Borgeaud
•Manuscript Feedback: Laurent Sifre, Geoﬀrey Irving and John Jumper
Acknowledgements
We’d like to thank Oriol Vinyals and Koray Kavukcuoglu for your kind advice and leadership. We’d
also like to thank Evan Senter for your additional feedback on the manuscript and Amelia Glaese for
your support in navigating the publishing process. Finally, we’d like to thank Blake Hechtman, Berkin
Ilbeyi for your valuable advice on XLA and Nikolai Grigoriev for our discussions on the various tricks
that can be applied to the transformer architecture.
Hyperparams
Table 2jHyperparameters for the draft model
Model 𝑑modelHeads Layers Params


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that can be applied to the transformer architecture.
Hyperparams
Table 2jHyperparameters for the draft model
Model 𝑑modelHeads Layers Params
Target (Chinchilla) 8192 64 80 70B
Draft 6144 48 8 4B
Proofs
Theorem1 (ModiﬁedRejectionSamplingrecoversthetargetdistribution) .Givendiscretedistributions
𝑞,𝑝and a single draft sample ˜𝑥𝑝, let𝑋be the ﬁnal resulting sample. For 𝑋=𝑥to be true, we must
either sample ˜𝑥=𝑥and then accept it, or resample it after ˜𝑥(of any value) is rejected. Hence:
ℙ¹𝑋=𝑥º
=ℙ¹˜𝑥=𝑥ºℙ¹˜𝑥acceptedj˜𝑥=𝑥º¸ℙ¹˜𝑥rejectedºℙ¹𝑋=𝑥j˜𝑥rejectedº
For the ﬁrst term, we apply the acceptance rule:


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For the ﬁrst term, we apply the acceptance rule:
ℙ¹˜𝑥=𝑥ºℙ¹˜𝑥acceptedj˜𝑥=𝑥º
=𝑝¹𝑥ºmin
1𝑞¹𝑥º
𝑝¹𝑥º
10
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
=min¹𝑝¹𝑥º𝑞¹𝑥ºº
For the second conditional term, we apply the resampling rule:
ℙ¹𝑋=𝑥j˜𝑥rejectedº=¹𝑞¹𝑥º𝑝¹𝑥ºº¸
Where¹º¸denotes:
¹𝑓¹𝑥ºº¸=max¹0 𝑓¹𝑥ººÍ
𝑥max¹0 𝑓¹𝑥ºº
Finally, we calculate the probability of rejection:
ℙ¹˜𝑥rejectedº=1ℙ¹˜𝑥acceptedº


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Finally, we calculate the probability of rejection:
ℙ¹˜𝑥rejectedº=1ℙ¹˜𝑥acceptedº
=1∑︁
𝑥0ℙ¹𝑋=𝑥0˜𝑥acceptedº
=1∑︁
𝑥0min¹𝑝¹𝑥0º𝑞¹𝑥0ºº
=∑︁
𝑥0max¹0𝑞¹𝑥0º𝑝¹𝑥0ºº
=∑︁
𝑥0𝑞¹𝑥0ºmin¹𝑝¹𝑥0º𝑞¹𝑥0ºº
=∑︁
𝑥0max¹0𝑞¹𝑥0º𝑝¹𝑥0ºº
This is equal to the denominator of ¹𝑞¹𝑥º𝑝¹𝑥ºº¸, so:


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This is equal to the denominator of ¹𝑞¹𝑥º𝑝¹𝑥ºº¸, so:
ℙ¹˜𝑥rejectedºℙ¹𝑋=𝑥j˜𝑥rejectedº=max¹0𝑞¹𝑥º𝑝¹𝑥ºº
Hence:
ℙ¹𝑋=𝑥º
=min¹𝑝¹𝑥º𝑞¹𝑥ºº¸max¹0𝑞¹𝑥º𝑝¹𝑥ºº
=𝑞¹𝑥º
and we have recovered the desired target.
11


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GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from
Multi-Head Checkpoints
Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jongyy
Yury Zemlyanskiy ,Federico Lebrón ,Sumit Sanghai
Google Research
Abstract
Multi-query attention (MQA), which only
uses a single key-value head, drastically
speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA
can lead to quality degradation, and moreover
it may not be desirable to train a separate
model just for faster inference. We (1) propose
a recipe for uptraining existing multi-head language model checkpoints into models with
MQA using 5% of original pre-training compute, and (2) introduce grouped-query attention (GQA), a generalization of multi-query attention which uses an intermediate (more than
one, less than number of query heads) number
of key-value heads. We show that uptrained
GQA achieves quality close to multi-head attention with comparable speed to MQA.
1 Introduction
Autoregressive decoder inference is a severe bottleneck for Transformer models due to the memory
bandwidth overhead from loading decoder weights
and all attention keys and values at every decoding step (Shazeer, 2019; Pope et al., 2022; de Jong
et al., 2022). The memory bandwidth from loading


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and all attention keys and values at every decoding step (Shazeer, 2019; Pope et al., 2022; de Jong
et al., 2022). The memory bandwidth from loading
keys and values can be sharply reduced through
multi-query attention (Shazeer, 2019), which uses
multiple query heads but single key and value
heads.
However, multi-query attention ( MQA ) can lead
to quality degradation and training instability, and
it may not be feasible to train separate models
optimized for quality and inference. Moreover,
while some language models already use multiquery attention, such as PaLM (Chowdhery et al.,
2022), many do not, including publicly available
language models such as T5 (Raffel et al., 2020)
and LLaMA (Touvron et al., 2023).
This work contains two contributions for faster
inference with large language models. First, we
Equal contribution.
yUniversity of Southern California. Work done at Google
Research.show that language model checkpoints with multihead attention ( MHA ) can be uptrained (Komatsuzaki et al., 2022) to use MQA with a small fraction of original training compute. This presents a
cost-effective method to obtain fast multi-query as
well as high-quality MHA checkpoints.
Second, we propose grouped-query attention


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cost-effective method to obtain fast multi-query as
well as high-quality MHA checkpoints.
Second, we propose grouped-query attention
(GQA ), an interpolation between multi-head and
multi-query attention with single key and value
heads per subgroup of query heads . We show that
uptrained GQA achieves quality close to multihead attention while being almost as fast as multiquery attention.
2 Method
2.1 Uptraining
Generating a multi-query model from a multi-head
model takes place in two steps: ﬁrst, converting the
checkpoint, and second, additional pre-training to
allow the model to adapt to its new structure. Figure 1 shows the process for converting a multi-head
checkpoint into a multi-query checkpoint. The projection matrices for key and value heads are mean
pooled into single projection matrices, which we
ﬁnd works better than selecting a single key and
value head or randomly initializing new key and
value heads from scratch.
Figure 1: Overview of conversion from multi-head to
multi-query attention. Key and value projection matrices from all heads are mean pooled into a single head.
The converted checkpoint is then pre-trained forarXiv:2305.13245v1  [cs.CL]  22 May 2023


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The converted checkpoint is then pre-trained forarXiv:2305.13245v1  [cs.CL]  22 May 2023
Figure 2: Overview of grouped-query method. Multi-head attention has H query, key, and value heads. Multi-query
attention shares single key and value heads across all query heads. Grouped-query attention instead shares single
key and value heads for each group of query heads, interpolating between multi-head and multi-query attention.
a small proportion of its original training steps
on the same pre-training recipe.
2.2 Grouped-query attention
Grouped-query attention divides query heads into
Ggroups , each of which shares a single key head
and value head. GQA -Grefers to grouped-query
withGgroups. GQA -1, with a single group and
therefore single key and value head, is equivalent to
MQA , while GQA -H, with groups equal to number
of heads, is equivalent to MHA . Figure 2 shows a
comparison of grouped-query attention and multihead/multi-query attention. When converting a
multi-head checkpoint to a GQA checkpoint, we
construct each group key and value head by meanpooling all the original heads within that group.
An intermediate number of groups leads to an


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construct each group key and value head by meanpooling all the original heads within that group.
An intermediate number of groups leads to an
interpolated model that is higher quality than MQA
but faster than MHA , and, as we will show, represents a favorable trade-off. Going from MHA
toMQA reducesHkey and value heads to a single key and value head, reducing the size of the
key-value cache and therefore amount of data that
needs to be loaded by a factor of H. However,
larger models generally scale the number of heads,
such that multi-query attention represents a more
aggressive cut in both memory bandwidth and capacity. GQA lets us keep the same proportional
decrease in bandwidth and capacity as model size
increases.
Moreover, larger models suffer relatively less
from memory bandwidth overhead from attention,
as the KV-cache scales with model dimension
while model FLOPs and parameters scale with the
square of model dimension. Finally, standard sharding for large models replicates the single key and
value head by the number of model partitions (Popeet al., 2022); GQA removes the waste from such
partitioning. Therefore, we expect GQA to present
a particularly good trade-off for larger models.
3 Experiments
3.1 Experimental setup
Conﬁgurations All models are based on the


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a particularly good trade-off for larger models.
3 Experiments
3.1 Experimental setup
Conﬁgurations All models are based on the
T5.1.1 architecture (Raffel et al., 2020), implemented with JAX (Bradbury et al., 2018),
Flax (Heek et al., 2020), and Flaxformer1. For
our main experiments we consider T5 Large and
XXL with multi-head attention, as well as uptrained
versions of T5 XXL with multi-query and groupedquery attention. We apply MQA andGQA to
decoder self-attention and cross-attention, but not
encoder self-attention.
Uptraining Uptrained models are initialized
from public T5.1.1 checkpoints. The key and value
heads are mean-pooled to the appropriate MQA or
GQA structure, and then pre-trained for a further
proportion of original pre-training steps with the
original pre-training setup (Raffel et al., 2020).
Data We evaluate on summarization datasets
CNN/Daily Mail (Nallapati et al., 2016), arXiv
and PubMed (Cohan et al., 2018), MediaSum (Zhu
et al., 2021), and Multi-News (Fabbri et al., 2019);


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and PubMed (Cohan et al., 2018), MediaSum (Zhu
et al., 2021), and Multi-News (Fabbri et al., 2019);
translation dataset WMT 2014 English-to-German;
and question answering dataset TriviaQA (Joshi
et al., 2017). We do not evaluate on popular classiﬁcation benchmarks such as GLUE (Wang et al.,
2019) as autoregressive inference is less applicable
for those tasks.
1https://github.com/google/flaxformer
Model Tinfer Average CNN arXiv PubMed MediaSum MultiNews WMT TriviaQA
s R1 R1 R1 R1 R1 BLEU F1
MHA-Large 0.37 46.0 42.9 44.6 46.2 35.5 46.6 27.7 78.2
MHA-XXL 1.51 47.2 43.8 45.6 47.5 36.4 46.9 28.4 81.9
MQA-XXL 0.24 46.5 43.0 45.0 47.2 36.1 46.5 28.5 81.3
GQA-8-XXL 0.28 47.1 43.5 45.4 47.7 36.3 47.2 28.4 81.6


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GQA-8-XXL 0.28 47.1 43.5 45.4 47.7 36.3 47.2 28.4 81.6
Table 1: Inference time and average dev set performance comparison of T5 Large and XXL models with multihead attention, and 5% uptrained T5-XXL models with multi-query and grouped-query attention on summarization
datasets CNN/Daily Mail, arXiv, PubMed, MediaSum, and MultiNews, translation dataset WMT, and questionanswering dataset TriviaQA.
Fine-tuning For ﬁne-tuning, we use a constant
learning rate of 0.001, batch size 128, and dropout
rate 0.1 for all tasks. CNN/Daily Mail and WMT
use input length of 512 and output length 256.
Other summarization datasets use input length
2048 and output length 512. Finally, TriviaQA
uses input length 2048 and output length 32. We
train until convergence and select the checkpoint
with the highest dev performance. We use greedy
decoding for inference.
Timing We report time per sample per TPUv4
chip, as measured by xprof (Google, 2020). For
timing experiments we use 8 TPUs with the largest


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Timing We report time per sample per TPUv4
chip, as measured by xprof (Google, 2020). For
timing experiments we use 8 TPUs with the largest
batch size that ﬁts up to 32 per TPU, and parallelization optimized separately for each model.
0 0:5 1 1:54646:547
MHA-LargeMHA-XXL
MQA-XXLGQA-XXL
Time per sample (ms)Performance
Figure 3: Uptrained MQA yields a favorable tradeoff compared to MHA with higher quality and
faster speed than MHA-Large, and GQA achieves
even better performance with similar speed gains
and comparable quality to MHA-XXL. Average performance on all tasks as a function of average inference
time per sample for T5-Large and T5-XXL with multihead attention, and 5% uptrained T5-XXL with MQA
and GQA-8 attention.3.2 Main results
Figure 3 shows average performance over all
datasets as a function of average inference time
forMHA T5-Large and T5-XXL, and uptrained
MQA andGQA -8XXL models with uptraining


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forMHA T5-Large and T5-XXL, and uptrained
MQA andGQA -8XXL models with uptraining
proportion= 0:05. We see that a larger uptrained MQA model provides a favorable tradeoff relative to MHA models, with higher quality
and faster inference than MHA -Large. Moreover,
GQA achieves signiﬁcant additional quality gains,
achieving performance close to MHA -XXL with
speed close to MQA . Table 1 contains full results
for all datasets.
3.3 Ablations
This section presents experiments to investigate
the effect of different modeling choices. We evaluate performance on a representive subsample of
tasks: CNN/Daily Mail, (short-form summarization), MultiNews (long-form summarization), and
TriviaQA (question-answering).
54:454:654:855 55:255:455:6Mean
First
Random
Figure 4: Performance comparison of different checkpoint conversion methods for T5-Large uptrained to
MQA with proportion = 0:05. ‘Mean’ mean-pools
key and value heads, ‘First’ selects the ﬁrst head and
‘Random’ initializes heads from scratch.
Checkpoint conversion Figure 4 compares the


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key and value heads, ‘First’ selects the ﬁrst head and
‘Random’ initializes heads from scratch.
Checkpoint conversion Figure 4 compares the
performance of different methods for checkpoint
conversion. Mean pooling appears to work best,
followed by selecting a single head and then random initialization. Intuitively, results are ordered
by the degree to which information is preserved
from the pre-trained model.
Uptraining steps Figure 5 shows how performance varies with uptraining proportion for T5
XXL with MQA andGQA . First, we note that
GQA already achieves reasonable performance after conversion while MQA requires uptraining to
be useful. Both MQA andGQA gain from 5%
uptraining with diminishing returns from 10%.
0 0:02 0:04 0:06 0:08 0:154555657
Uptraining proportion PerformanceMHA
GQA
MQA
Figure 5: Performance as a function of uptraining proportion for T5 XXL models with MQA and GQA-8.
Number of groups Figure 6 demonstrates the
effect of the number of GQA groups on inference speed. For larger models the memory bandwidth overhead from the KV cache is less constraining (Shazeer, 2019), while the reduction in


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effect of the number of GQA groups on inference speed. For larger models the memory bandwidth overhead from the KV cache is less constraining (Shazeer, 2019), while the reduction in
key-value size is sharper due to the increased number of heads. As a result, increasing the number
of groups from MQA only results in modest slowdowns initially, with increasing cost as we move
closer to MHA . We selected 8 groups as a favorable middle ground.
4 Related Work
This work is focused on achieving a better tradeoff between decoder quality and inference time
through reducing the memory bandwidth overhead (Williams et al., 2009) from loading keys and
values. Shazeer (2019) ﬁrst proposed reducing this
overhead through multi-query attention. Follow-up
work showed that multi-query attention is especially helpful for long inputs (Pope et al., 2022;
de Jong et al., 2022).
A number of other methods have been proposed
to reduce memory bandwidth overhead from keys
and values, as well as parameters. Flash atten-1 4 8 16 32 6412
GQA groupsTime per sample (s)MHA
GQA
MQA
Figure 6: Time per sample for GQA-XXL as a function of the number of GQA groups with input length
2048 and output length 512. Going from 1 (MQA) to


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2048 and output length 512. Going from 1 (MQA) to
8 groups adds modest inference overhead, with increasing cost to adding more groups.
tion (Dao et al., 2022) structures the attention computation to avoid materializing the quadratic attention scores, reducing memory and speeding up
training. Quantization (Dettmers et al., 2022; Zeng
et al., 2022; Frantar et al., 2022) reduces the size of
weights and activations, including keys and values,
by lowering precision. Model distillation (Hinton et al., 2015; Gou et al., 2021) instead reduces
model size at a given precision, using data generated from the larger model to ﬁnetune the smaller
model. Layer-sparse cross-attention (de Jong et al.,
2022) eliminates most cross-attention layers which
make up the primary expense for longer inputs.
Speculative sampling (Chen et al., 2023; Leviathan
et al., 2022; Kim et al., 2023) ameliorates the memory bandwidth bottleneck by proposing multiple
tokens with a smaller model which are then scored
in parallel by a larger model.
Finally, the uptraining procedure we propose
is inspired by Komatsuzaki et al. (2022), which
uptrains standard T5 checkpoints into sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts models.
5 Conclusion


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is inspired by Komatsuzaki et al. (2022), which
uptrains standard T5 checkpoints into sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts models.
5 Conclusion
Language models are expensive for inference primarily due to the memory bandwidth overhead
from loading keys and values. Multi-query attention reduces this overhead at the cost of decreased
model capacity and quality. We propose to convert
multi-head attention models to multi-query models
with a small fraction of original pre-training compute. Moreover, we introduce grouped-query attention, an interpolation of multi-query and multi-head
attention that achieves quality close to multi-head
at comparable speed to multi-query attention.
Acknowlegements
We thank Santiago Ontañón, Afroz Mohiuddin,
William Cohen and others at Google Research for
insightful advice and discussion.
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A Training Stability
We ﬁnd that multi-query attention can lead to training instability, in particular combined with long
input tasks. We trained multiple T5-Large models with multi-query attention from scratch. In
each case, pre-training suffered from frequent loss
spikes and the ﬁnal models diverged immediately
on long-input tasks. Uptrained multi-query attention models are more stable but still display high
variance, so for multi-query models on unstable
tasks we report average performance over multiple
runs. Uptrained grouped-query attention models,
however, appear to be stable.


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L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle : Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models
Hugo TouvronLouis MartinyKevin Stoney
Peter Albert Amjad Almahairi Yasmine Babaei Nikolay Bashlykov Soumya Batra
Prajjwal Bhargava Shruti Bhosale Dan Bikel Lukas Blecher Cristian Canton Ferrer Moya Chen
Guillem Cucurull David Esiobu Jude Fernandes Jeremy Fu Wenyin Fu Brian Fuller
Cynthia Gao Vedanuj Goswami Naman Goyal Anthony Hartshorn Saghar Hosseini Rui Hou
Hakan Inan Marcin Kardas Viktor Kerkez Madian Khabsa Isabel Kloumann Artem Korenev
Punit Singh Koura Marie-Anne Lachaux Thibaut Lavril Jenya Lee Diana Liskovich
Yinghai Lu Yuning Mao Xavier Martinet Todor Mihaylov Pushkar Mishra
Igor Molybog Yixin Nie Andrew Poulton Jeremy Reizenstein Rashi Rungta Kalyan Saladi
Alan Schelten Ruan Silva Eric Michael Smith Ranjan Subramanian Xiaoqing Ellen Tan Binh Tang


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Alan Schelten Ruan Silva Eric Michael Smith Ranjan Subramanian Xiaoqing Ellen Tan Binh Tang
Ross Taylor Adina Williams Jian Xiang Kuan Puxin Xu Zheng Yan Iliyan Zarov Yuchen Zhang
Angela Fan Melanie Kambadur Sharan Narang Aurelien Rodriguez Robert Stojnic
Sergey Edunov Thomas Scialom
GenAI, Meta
Abstract
In this work, we develop and release Llama 2, a collection of pretrained and ﬁne-tuned
large language models (LLMs) ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters.
Our ﬁne-tuned LLMs, called L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , are optimized for dialogue use cases. Our
models outperform open-source chat models on most benchmarks we tested, and based on
ourhumanevaluationsforhelpfulnessandsafety,maybeasuitablesubstituteforclosedsource models. We provide a detailed description of our approach to ﬁne-tuning and safety


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improvements of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc in order to enable the community to build on our work and
contribute to the responsible development of LLMs.
Equal contribution, corresponding authors: {tscialom, htouvron}@meta.com
ySecond author
Contributions for all the authors can be found in Section A.1.arXiv:2307.09288v2  [cs.CL]  19 Jul 2023
Contents
1 Introduction 3
2 Pretraining 5
2.1 Pretraining Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Training Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5


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2.3 L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle Pretrained Model Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3 Fine-tuning 8
3.1 Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.2 Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3 System Message for Multi-Turn Consistency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.4 RLHF Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4 Safety 20


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4 Safety 20
4.1 Safety in Pretraining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.2 Safety Fine-Tuning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.3 Red Teaming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4.4 Safety Evaluation of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
5 Discussion 32
5.1 Learnings and Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32


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5.2 Limitations and Ethical Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.3 Responsible Release Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
6 Related Work 35
7 Conclusion 36
A Appendix 46
A.1 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
A.2 Additional Details for Pretraining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
A.3 Additional Details for Fine-tuning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
A.4 Additional Details for Safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58


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A.5 Data Annotation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
A.6 Dataset Contamination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
A.7 Model Card . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2
Figure1: Helpfulnesshumanevaluation resultsfor L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc
/two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sccomparedtootheropen-sourceandclosed-source
models. Human raters compared model generations on ~4k
promptsconsistingofbothsingleandmulti-turnprompts.
The95%conﬁdenceintervalsforthisevaluationarebetween
1%and2%. MoredetailsinSection3.4.2. Whilereviewing


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The95%conﬁdenceintervalsforthisevaluationarebetween
1%and2%. MoredetailsinSection3.4.2. Whilereviewing
these results, it is important to note that human evaluations
canbenoisyduetolimitationsofthepromptset,subjectivity
of the review guidelines, subjectivity of individual raters,
and the inherent diﬃculty of comparing generations.
Figure 2: Win-rate % for helpfulness and
safety between commercial-licensed baselines and L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , according to GPT4. Tocomplementthehumanevaluation,we
used a more capable model, not subject to
ourownguidance. Greenareaindicatesour
modelisbetteraccordingtoGPT-4. Toremove
ties, we used win= (win+loss). The orders in
whichthemodelresponsesarepresentedto
GPT-4arerandomlyswappedtoalleviatebias.
1 Introduction
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise as highly capable AI assistants that excel in
complex reasoning tasks requiring expert knowledge across a wide range of ﬁelds, including in specialized


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complex reasoning tasks requiring expert knowledge across a wide range of ﬁelds, including in specialized
domains such as programming and creative writing. They enable interaction with humans through intuitive
chat interfaces, which has led to rapid and widespread adoption among the general public.
ThecapabilitiesofLLMsareremarkableconsideringtheseeminglystraightforwardnatureofthetraining
methodology. Auto-regressivetransformersarepretrainedonanextensivecorpusofself-superviseddata,
followed by alignment with human preferences via techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human
Feedback(RLHF).Althoughthetrainingmethodologyissimple,highcomputationalrequirementshave
limited the development of LLMs to a few players. There have been public releases of pretrained LLMs
(such as BLOOM (Scao et al., 2022), LLaMa-1 (Touvron et al., 2023), and Falcon (Penedo et al., 2023)) that
match the performance of closed pretrained competitors like GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) and Chinchilla
(Hoﬀmann et al., 2022), but none of these models are suitable substitutes for closed “product” LLMs, such
asChatGPT,BARD,andClaude. TheseclosedproductLLMsareheavilyﬁne-tunedtoalignwithhuman


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asChatGPT,BARD,andClaude. TheseclosedproductLLMsareheavilyﬁne-tunedtoalignwithhuman
preferences, which greatly enhances their usability and safety. This step can require signiﬁcant costs in
computeandhumanannotation,andisoftennottransparentoreasilyreproducible,limitingprogresswithin
the community to advance AI alignment research.
In this work, we develop and release Llama 2, a family of pretrained and ﬁne-tuned LLMs, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle and
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , at scales up to 70B parameters. On the series of helpfulness and safety benchmarks we tested,
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc models generally perform better than existing open-source models. They also appear to
be on par with some of the closed-source models, at least on the human evaluations we performed (see


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be on par with some of the closed-source models, at least on the human evaluations we performed (see
Figures1and3). Wehavetakenmeasurestoincreasethesafetyofthesemodels,usingsafety-speciﬁcdata
annotation and tuning, as well as conducting red-teaming and employing iterative evaluations. Additionally,
thispapercontributesathoroughdescriptionofourﬁne-tuningmethodologyandapproachtoimproving
LLM safety. We hope that this openness will enable the community to reproduce ﬁne-tuned LLMs and
continue to improve the safety of those models, paving the way for more responsible development of LLMs.
Wealsosharenovelobservationswemadeduringthedevelopmentof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle andL/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc ,suchas
the emergence of tool usage and temporal organization of knowledge.
3


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the emergence of tool usage and temporal organization of knowledge.
3
Figure 3: Safety human evaluation results for L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc compared to other open-source and closedsource models. Human raters judged model generations for safety violations across ~2,000 adversarial
prompts consisting of both single and multi-turn prompts. More details can be found in Section 4.4. It is
importanttocaveatthesesafetyresultswiththeinherentbiasofLLMevaluationsduetolimitationsofthe
promptset,subjectivityofthereviewguidelines,andsubjectivityofindividualraters. Additionally,these
safety evaluations are performed using content standards that are likely to be biased towards the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc
/two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.scmodels.
We are releasing the following models to the general public for research and commercial use‡:


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We are releasing the following models to the general public for research and commercial use‡:
1.L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle,anupdatedversionof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle,trainedonanewmixofpubliclyavailabledata. Wealso
increasedthesizeofthepretrainingcorpusby40%,doubledthecontextlengthofthemodel,and
adoptedgrouped-queryattention(Ainslieetal.,2023). Wearereleasingvariantsof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle with
7B,13B,and70Bparameters. Wehavealsotrained34Bvariants,whichwereportoninthispaper
but are not releasing.§
2.L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , a ﬁne-tuned version of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle that is optimized for dialogue use cases. We release


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variants of this model with 7B, 13B, and 70B parameters as well.
WebelievethattheopenreleaseofLLMs,whendonesafely,willbeanetbeneﬁttosociety. LikeallLLMs,
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle is a new technology that carries potential risks with use (Bender et al., 2021b; Weidinger et al., 2021;
Solaimanet al.,2023). Testingconductedtodate hasbeeninEnglish andhasnot— andcouldnot— cover
all scenarios. Therefore, before deploying any applications of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , developers should perform
safetytestingand tuningtailoredtotheirspeciﬁcapplicationsofthemodel. Weprovidearesponsibleuse
guide¶and code examples‖to facilitate the safe deployment of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle andL/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc . More details of


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our responsible release strategy can be found in Section 5.3.
Theremainderofthispaperdescribesourpretrainingmethodology(Section2),ﬁne-tuningmethodology
(Section 3), approach to model safety (Section 4), key observations and insights (Section 5), relevant related
work (Section 6), and conclusions (Section 7).
‡https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama/
§We are delaying the release of the 34B model due to a lack of time to suﬃciently red team.
¶https://ai.meta.com/llama
‖https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama
4
Figure 4: Training of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc : This process begins with the pretraining ofL/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle using publicly
availableonlinesources. Followingthis,wecreateaninitialversionof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc throughtheapplication


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ofsupervised ﬁne-tuning . Subsequently, the model is iteratively reﬁned using Reinforcement Learning
with Human Feedback (RLHF) methodologies, speciﬁcally through rejection sampling and Proximal Policy
Optimization(PPO).ThroughouttheRLHFstage,theaccumulationof iterativerewardmodelingdata in
parallel with model enhancements is crucial to ensure the reward models remain within distribution.
2 Pretraining
Tocreatethenewfamilyof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstylemodels,webeganwiththepretrainingapproachdescribedinTouvronetal.
(2023), using an optimized auto-regressive transformer, but made several changes to improve performance.
Speciﬁcally,weperformedmorerobustdatacleaning,updatedourdatamixes,trainedon40%moretotal
tokens,doubledthecontextlength,andusedgrouped-queryattention(GQA)toimproveinferencescalability


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tokens,doubledthecontextlength,andusedgrouped-queryattention(GQA)toimproveinferencescalability
for our larger models. Table 1 compares the attributes of the new L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle models with the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle models.
2.1 Pretraining Data
Our training corpus includes a new mix of data from publicly available sources, which does not include data
fromMeta’sproductsorservices. Wemadeaneﬀorttoremovedatafromcertainsitesknowntocontaina
highvolumeofpersonalinformationaboutprivateindividuals. Wetrainedon2trilliontokensofdataasthis
providesagoodperformance–costtrade-oﬀ,up-samplingthemostfactualsourcesinaneﬀorttoincrease
knowledge and dampen hallucinations.
Weperformedavarietyofpretrainingdatainvestigationssothatuserscanbetterunderstandthepotential
capabilities and limitations of our models; results can be found in Section 4.1.
2.2 Training Details


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capabilities and limitations of our models; results can be found in Section 4.1.
2.2 Training Details
We adopt most of the pretraining setting and model architecture from L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle . We use the standard
transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017), apply pre-normalization using RMSNorm (Zhang and
Sennrich, 2019), use the SwiGLU activation function (Shazeer, 2020), and rotary positional embeddings
(RoPE, Su et al. 2022). The primary architectural diﬀerences from L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle include increased context length
andgrouped-queryattention(GQA).WedetailinAppendixSectionA.2.1eachofthesediﬀerenceswith
ablation experiments to demonstrate their importance.
Hyperparameters. We trained using the AdamW optimizer (Loshchilov and Hutter, 2017), with 1=
0:9;2= 0:95;eps= 105. We use a cosine learning rate schedule, with warmup of 2000 steps, and decay


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0:9;2= 0:95;eps= 105. We use a cosine learning rate schedule, with warmup of 2000 steps, and decay
ﬁnallearningratedownto10%ofthepeaklearningrate. Weuseaweightdecayof 0:1andgradientclipping
of1:0. Figure 5 (a) shows the training loss for L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle with these hyperparameters.
5
Training Data Params Context
LengthGQA Tokens LR
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyleSee Touvron et al.
(2023)7B 2k 7 1.0T 3:0104
13B 2k 7 1.0T 3:0104
33B 2k 7 1.4T 1:5104
65B 2k 7 1.4T 1:5104
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyleA new mix of publicly
available online data7B 4k 7 2.0T 3:0104
13B 4k 7 2.0T 3:0104


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available online data7B 4k 7 2.0T 3:0104
13B 4k 7 2.0T 3:0104
34B 4k X 2.0T 1:5104
70B 4k X 2.0T 1:5104
Table1: L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle familyofmodels. Tokencountsrefertopretrainingdataonly. Allmodelsaretrainedwith
a global batch-size of 4M tokens. Bigger models — 34B and 70B — use Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for
improved inference scalability.
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000
Processed Tokens (Billions)1.41.51.61.71.81.92.02.12.2Train PPLLlama-2
7B
13B
34B
70B
Figure5: TrainingLossfor L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle models. Wecomparethetraininglossof the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle family ofmodels.


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We observe that after pretraining on 2T Tokens, the models still did not show any sign of saturation.
Tokenizer. Weusethesametokenizeras L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle;itemploysabytepairencoding(BPE)algorithm(Sennrich
etal.,2016)usingtheimplementationfromSentencePiece(KudoandRichardson,2018). Aswith L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle,
we split all numbers into individual digits and use bytes to decompose unknown UTF-8 characters. The total
vocabulary size is 32k tokens.
2.2.1 Training Hardware & Carbon Footprint
TrainingHardware. WepretrainedourmodelsonMeta’sResearchSuperCluster(RSC)(LeeandSengupta,
2022)aswellasinternalproductionclusters. BothclustersuseNVIDIAA100s. Therearetwokeydiﬀerences
between the two clusters, with the ﬁrst being the type of interconnect available: RSC uses NVIDIA Quantum
InﬁniBandwhileourproductionclusterisequippedwithaRoCE(RDMAoverconvergedEthernet)solution


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InﬁniBandwhileourproductionclusterisequippedwithaRoCE(RDMAoverconvergedEthernet)solution
based on commodity ethernet Switches. Both of these solutions interconnect 200 Gbps end-points. The
seconddiﬀerenceistheper-GPUpowerconsumptioncap—RSCuses400Wwhileourproductioncluster
uses350W.Withthistwo-clustersetup,wewereabletocomparethesuitabilityofthesediﬀerenttypesof
interconnectforlargescaletraining. RoCE(whichisamoreaﬀordable,commercialinterconnectnetwork)
6
Time
(GPU hours)Power
Consumption (W)Carbon Emitted
(tCO 2eq)
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle7B 184320 400 31.22
13B 368640 400 62.44
34B 1038336 350 153.90
70B 1720320 400 291.42
Total 3311616 539.00
Table 2: CO 2emissions during pretraining. Time: total GPU time required for training each model. Power
Consumption: peak power capacity per GPU device for the GPUs used adjusted for power usage eﬃciency.


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Consumption: peak power capacity per GPU device for the GPUs used adjusted for power usage eﬃciency.
100%oftheemissionsaredirectlyoﬀsetbyMeta’ssustainabilityprogram,andbecauseweareopenlyreleasing
these models, the pretraining costs do not need to be incurred by others.
can scale almost as well as expensive Inﬁniband up to 2000 GPUs, which makes pretraining even more
democratizable.
CarbonFootprintofPretraining. Followingprecedingresearch(Benderetal.,2021a;Pattersonetal.,2021;
Wu et al., 2022; Dodge et al., 2022) and using power consumption estimates of GPU devices and carbon
eﬃciency, we aim tocalculate thecarbon emissions resultingfrom the pretrainingof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle models. The
actualpowerusageofaGPUisdependentonitsutilizationandislikelytovaryfromtheThermalDesign
Power(TDP)thatweemployasanestimationforGPUpower. Itisimportanttonotethatourcalculations
do not account for further power demands, such as those from interconnect or non-GPU server power


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do not account for further power demands, such as those from interconnect or non-GPU server power
consumption,norfromdatacentercoolingsystems. Additionally,thecarbonoutputrelatedtotheproduction
of AI hardware, like GPUs, could add to the overall carbon footprint as suggested by Gupta et al. (2022b,a).
Table 2 summarizes the carbon emission for pretraining the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle family of models. A cumulative of
3.3M GPUhours ofcomputation wasperformed onhardware oftype A100-80GB (TDPof 400Wor 350W).
Weestimatethetotalemissionsfortrainingtobe 539tCO 2eq,ofwhich100%weredirectlyoﬀsetbyMeta’s
sustainability program.∗∗Our open release strategy also means that these pretraining costs will not need to
be incurred by other companies, saving more global resources.
2.3 L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle Pretrained Model Evaluation


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2.3 L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle Pretrained Model Evaluation
In this section, we report the results for the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle andL/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle base models, MosaicML Pretrained
Transformer(MPT)††models,andFalcon(Almazroueietal.,2023)modelsonstandardacademicbenchmarks.
For all the evaluations, we use our internal evaluations library. We reproduce results for the MPT and Falcon
modelsinternally. Forthesemodels,wealwayspickthebestscorebetweenourevaluationframeworkand
any publicly reported results.
InTable3,wesummarizetheoverallperformanceacrossasuiteofpopularbenchmarks. Notethatsafety
benchmarks are shared in Section 4.1. The benchmarks are grouped into the categories listed below. The
results for all the individual benchmarks are available in Section A.2.2.
•Code.Wereporttheaveragepass@1scoresofourmodelsonHumanEval(Chenetal.,2021)and
MBPP (Austin et al., 2021).


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•Code.Wereporttheaveragepass@1scoresofourmodelsonHumanEval(Chenetal.,2021)and
MBPP (Austin et al., 2021).
•CommonsenseReasoning. WereporttheaverageofPIQA(Bisketal.,2020),SIQA(Sapetal.,2019),
HellaSwag (Zellers et al., 2019a), WinoGrande (Sakaguchi et al., 2021), ARC easy and challenge
(Clark et al., 2018), OpenBookQA (Mihaylov et al., 2018), and CommonsenseQA (Talmor et al.,
2018). We report 7-shot results for CommonSenseQA and 0-shot results for all other benchmarks.
•WorldKnowledge. Weevaluatethe5-shotperformanceonNaturalQuestions(Kwiatkowskietal.,
2019) and TriviaQA (Joshi et al., 2017) and report the average.
•Reading Comprehension. For reading comprehension, we report the 0-shot average on SQuAD
(Rajpurkar et al., 2018), QuAC (Choi et al., 2018), and BoolQ (Clark et al., 2019).
•MATH. We report the average of the GSM8K (8 shot) (Cobbe et al., 2021) and MATH (4 shot)


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•MATH. We report the average of the GSM8K (8 shot) (Cobbe et al., 2021) and MATH (4 shot)
(Hendrycks et al., 2021) benchmarks at top 1.
∗∗https://sustainability.fb.com/2021-sustainability-report/
††https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b
7
Model Size CodeCommonsense
ReasoningWorld
KnowledgeReading
ComprehensionMath MMLU BBH AGI Eval
MPT7B 20.5 57.4 41.0 57.5 4.9 26.8 31.0 23.5
30B 28.9 64.9 50.0 64.7 9.1 46.9 38.0 33.8
Falcon7B 5.6 56.1 42.8 36.0 4.6 26.2 28.0 21.2
40B 15.2 69.2 56.7 65.7 12.6 55.4 37.1 37.0
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle7B 14.1 60.8 46.2 58.5 6.95 35.1 30.3 23.9


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13B 18.9 66.1 52.6 62.3 10.9 46.9 37.0 33.9
33B 26.0 70.0 58.4 67.6 21.4 57.8 39.8 41.7
65B 30.7 70.7 60.5 68.6 30.8 63.4 43.5 47.6
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle7B 16.8 63.9 48.9 61.3 14.6 45.3 32.6 29.3
13B 24.5 66.9 55.4 65.8 28.7 54.8 39.4 39.1
34B 27.8 69.9 58.7 68.0 24.2 62.6 44.1 43.4
70B37.5 71.9 63.6 69.4 35.2 68.9 51.2 54.2
Table3: Overallperformanceongroupedacademicbenchmarkscomparedtoopen-sourcebasemodels.
•Popular Aggregated Benchmarks . We report the overall results for MMLU (5 shot) (Hendrycks


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•Popular Aggregated Benchmarks . We report the overall results for MMLU (5 shot) (Hendrycks
et al., 2020), Big Bench Hard (BBH) (3 shot) (Suzgun et al., 2022), and AGI Eval (3–5 shot) (Zhong
et al., 2023). For AGI Eval, we only evaluate on the English tasks and report the average.
As shown in Table 3, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle models outperform L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle models. In particular, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 70B improves the
resultsonMMLUandBBHby 5and8points,respectively,comparedto L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle 65B.L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 7Band30B
modelsoutperformMPTmodelsofthecorrespondingsizeonallcategoriesbesidescodebenchmarks. Forthe


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modelsoutperformMPTmodelsofthecorrespondingsizeonallcategoriesbesidescodebenchmarks. Forthe
Falcon models, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 7B and 34B outperform Falcon 7B and 40B models on all categories of benchmarks.
Additionally, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 70B model outperforms all open-source models.
In addition to open-source models, we also compare L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 70B results to closed-source models. As shown
in Table 4, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 70B is close to GPT-3.5 (OpenAI, 2023) on MMLU and GSM8K, but there is a signiﬁcant
gaponcodingbenchmarks. L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 70BresultsareonparorbetterthanPaLM(540B)(Chowdheryetal.,


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2022)onalmostallbenchmarks. Thereisstillalargegapinperformancebetween L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle 70BandGPT-4
and PaLM-2-L.
We also analysed the potential data contamination and share the details in Section A.6.
Benchmark (shots) GPT-3.5 GPT-4 PaLM PaLM-2-L L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle
MMLU (5-shot) 70.0 86.4 69.3 78.3 68.9
TriviaQA (1-shot) – – 81.4 86.1 85.0
Natural Questions (1-shot) – – 29.3 37.5 33.0
GSM8K (8-shot) 57.1 92.0 56.5 80.7 56.8
HumanEval (0-shot) 48.1 67.0 26.2 – 29.9
BIG-Bench Hard (3-shot) – – 52.3 65.7 51.2
Table 4: Comparison to closed-source models on academic benchmarks. Results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4


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Table 4: Comparison to closed-source models on academic benchmarks. Results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4
are from OpenAI (2023). Results for the PaLM model are from Chowdhery et al. (2022). Results for the
PaLM-2-L are from Anil et al. (2023).
3 Fine-tuning
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc is the result of several months of research and iterative applications of alignment techniques,
including both instruction tuning and RLHF, requiring signiﬁcant computational and annotation resources.
In this section, we report on our experiments and ﬁndings using supervised ﬁne-tuning (Section 3.1), as
well as initial and iterative reward modeling (Section 3.2.2) and RLHF (Section 3.2.3). We also share a
new technique, Ghost Attention (GAtt), which we ﬁnd helps control dialogue ﬂow over multiple turns
(Section 3.3). See Section 4.2 for safety evaluations on ﬁne-tuned models.
8
3.1 Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)


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(Section 3.3). See Section 4.2 for safety evaluations on ﬁne-tuned models.
8
3.1 Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)
äPrompt: Writeapoemtohelpmeremembertheﬁrst10elementsontheperiodictable,givingeach
element its own line.
Response: Hydrogen comes ﬁrst as element number one.
Helium is second for balloons to have fun!
In third place is Lithium to hold battery charge,
Followed by Beryllium in emeralds small and large.
Boron’s number ﬁve to help us keep things clean.
Carbon’s next at six, and it’s found in every gene.
Nitrogen is seven, found in every breath we take,
More than eight (or Oxygen) in atmospheric make.
Number nine is Fluorine, helping polish up our teeth.
Neon gives us glowing signs to read and stand beneath.
äPrompt: I want you to roast me. I want you to make it particularly brutal, swearing at me.
Response: I’m sorry, but I cannot comply with that request. Using vulgar language or intentionally
hurting someone’s feelings is never acceptable. Instead of asking for a roast, I suggest


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hurting someone’s feelings is never acceptable. Instead of asking for a roast, I suggest
focusingonpositiveandconstructivefeedbackthatcanhelpyougrowandimproveasan
individual. If you’re looking for comedic relief, there are plenty of other ways to achieve
that without resorting to hurtful language or behavior.
Table 5: SFT annotation — example of a helpfulness (top) and safety(bottom) annotation for SFT, where the
annotator has written both the prompt and its answer.
Getting Started. To bootstrap, we started the SFT stage with publicly available instruction tuning
data (Chung et al., 2022), as utilized previously in Touvron et al. (2023).
QualityIsAllYouNeed. Third-partySFTdataisavailablefrommanydiﬀerentsources,butwefoundthat
manyofthesehaveinsuﬃcientdiversityandquality—inparticularforaligningLLMstowardsdialogue-style
instructions. As a result, we focused ﬁrst on collecting several thousand examples of high-quality SFT data,
as illustrated in Table 5. By setting aside millions of examples from third-party datasets and using fewer but
higher-quality examples from our own vendor-based annotation eﬀorts, our results notably improved. These


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higher-quality examples from our own vendor-based annotation eﬀorts, our results notably improved. These
ﬁndingsaresimilarinspirittoZhouetal.(2023),whichalsoﬁndsthatalimitedsetofcleaninstruction-tuning
datacanbesuﬃcienttoreachahighlevelofquality. WefoundthatSFTannotationsintheorderoftensof
thousands was enough to achieve a high-quality result. We stopped annotating SFT after collecting a total of
27,540 annotations. Note that we do not include any Meta user data.
Wealsoobservedthatdiﬀerentannotationplatformsandvendorscanresultinmarkedlydiﬀerentdownstream model performance, highlighting the importance of data checks even when using vendors to source
annotations. Tovalidateourdataquality,wecarefullyexaminedasetof180examples,comparingtheannotations provided by humans with the samples generated by the model through manual scrutiny. Surprisingly,
we found that the outputs sampled from the resulting SFT model were often competitive with SFT data
handwritten by human annotators, suggesting that we could reprioritize and devote more annotation eﬀort
to preference-based annotation for RLHF.


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handwritten by human annotators, suggesting that we could reprioritize and devote more annotation eﬀort
to preference-based annotation for RLHF.
Fine-Tuning Details. For supervised ﬁne-tuning, we use a cosine learning rate schedule with an initial
learning rate of 2105, a weight decay of 0.1, a batch size of 64, and a sequence length of 4096 tokens.
For the ﬁne-tuning process, each sample consists of a prompt and an answer. To ensure the model sequence
lengthisproperlyﬁlled,weconcatenateallthepromptsandanswersfromthetrainingset. Aspecialtokenis
utilizedtoseparatethepromptandanswersegments. Weutilizeanautoregressiveobjectiveandzero-out
the loss on tokens from the user prompt, so as a result, we backpropagate only on answer tokens. Finally, we
ﬁne-tune the model for 2 epochs.
3.2 Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)
RLHFisamodeltrainingprocedurethatisappliedtoaﬁne-tunedlanguagemodeltofurther alignmodel
behavior with human preferences and instruction following. We collect data that represents empirically
9


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behavior with human preferences and instruction following. We collect data that represents empirically
9
sampled human preferences, whereby human annotators select which of two model outputs they prefer.
This human feedback is subsequently used to train a reward model, which learns patterns in the preferences
of the human annotators and can then automate preference decisions.
3.2.1 Human Preference Data Collection
Next, wecollect human preference datafor reward modeling. We chose a binarycomparison protocol over
other schemes, mainly because it enables us to maximize the diversity of collected prompts. Still, other
strategies are worth considering, which we leave for future work.
Our annotation procedure proceeds as follows. We ask annotators to ﬁrst write a prompt, then choose
betweentwosampledmodelresponses,basedonprovidedcriteria. Inordertomaximizethediversity,the
tworesponsestoagivenpromptaresampledfromtwodiﬀerentmodelvariants,andvaryingthetemperature
hyper-parameter. Inadditiontogivingparticipantsaforcedchoice,wealsoaskannotatorstolabelthedegree
to which they prefer their chosen response over the alternative: either their choice is signiﬁcantly better ,better,
slightly better , ornegligibly better/ unsure .


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to which they prefer their chosen response over the alternative: either their choice is signiﬁcantly better ,better,
slightly better , ornegligibly better/ unsure .
For our collection of preference annotations, we focus on helpfulness and safety. Helpfulness refers to how
well L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc responses fulﬁll users’ requests and provide requested information; safety refers to
whether L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc ’s responses are unsafe, e.g., “giving detailed instructions on making a bomb” could
be considered helpful but is unsafe according to our safety guidelines. Separating the two allows us to
applyspeciﬁcguidelinestoeachandbetterguideannotators;forexample,oursafetyannotationsprovide
instructions to focus on adversarial prompts, among other guidance.
Apart from diﬀerences in annotation guidelines, we additionally collect a safety label during the safety stage.
This additional information bins model responses into one of three categories: 1) the preferred response


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Apart from diﬀerences in annotation guidelines, we additionally collect a safety label during the safety stage.
This additional information bins model responses into one of three categories: 1) the preferred response
is safe and the other response is not, 2) both responses are safe, and 3) both responses are unsafe, with
18%, 47%, and 35% of the safety dataset falling into each bin, respectively. We do not include any examples
where the chosen response was unsafe and the other response safe, as we believe safer responses will also be
better/preferred by humans. Safety guidelines and more detailed information regarding safety annotations
can be found in Section 4.2.1.
Human annotations were collected in batches on a weekly basis. As we collected more preference data, our
reward models improved, and we were able to train progressively better versions for L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc (see
theresultsinSection5,Figure20). L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc improvementalsoshiftedthemodel’sdatadistribution.
Since reward model accuracy can quickly degrade if not exposed to this new sample distribution, i.e., from


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Since reward model accuracy can quickly degrade if not exposed to this new sample distribution, i.e., from
hyper-specialization(Scialometal.,2020b),itisimportantbeforeanew L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc tuningiterationto
gather new preference data using the latest L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc iterations. This step helps keep the reward model
on-distribution and maintain an accurate reward for the latest model.
InTable6,wereportthestatisticsofrewardmodelingdatathatwecollectedovertime,andpresentthem
against multiple open-source preference datasets including Anthropic Helpful and Harmless (Bai et al.,
2022a), OpenAISummarize(Stiennon etal., 2020),OpenAI WebGPT(Nakanoet al.,2021), StackExchange
(Lambert et al., 2023), Stanford Human Preferences (Ethayarajh et al., 2022), and Synthetic GPT-J (Havrilla).


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(Lambert et al., 2023), Stanford Human Preferences (Ethayarajh et al., 2022), and Synthetic GPT-J (Havrilla).
We collected a large dataset ofover 1million binary comparisons based on humansapplyingour speciﬁed
guidelines, which we refer to as Metareward modeling data. Note that the number of tokens in prompts and
answers diﬀers depending on the text domain. Summarization and online forum data generally have longer
prompts, while dialogue-style prompts are usually shorter. Compared to existing open-source datasets, our
preference data features more conversation turns, and are longer, on average.
3.2.2 Reward Modeling
The reward model takes a model response and its corresponding prompt (including contexts from previous
turns) as inputs and outputs a scalar score to indicate the quality (e.g., helpfulness and safety) of the model
generation. Leveragingsuchresponsescoresasrewards,wecanoptimize L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc duringRLHFfor
better human preference alignment and improved helpfulness and safety.


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better human preference alignment and improved helpfulness and safety.
Others have found that helpfulness and safety sometimes trade oﬀ (Bai et al., 2022a), which can make it
challengingforasinglerewardmodeltoperformwellonboth. Toaddressthis,wetraintwoseparatereward
models, one optimized for helpfulness (referred to as Helpfulness RM ) and another for safety ( Safety RM ).
We initialize our reward models from pretrained chat model checkpoints, as it ensures that both models
beneﬁtfromknowledgeacquiredinpretraining. Inshort, therewardmodel“knows” whatthechatmodel
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DatasetNum. of
ComparisonsAvg. # Turns
per DialogueAvg. # Tokens
per ExampleAvg. # Tokens
in PromptAvg. # Tokens
in Response
Anthropic Helpful 122,387 3.0 251.5 17.7 88.4
Anthropic Harmless 43,966 3.0 152.5 15.7 46.4
OpenAI Summarize 176,625 1.0 371.1 336.0 35.1
OpenAI WebGPT 13,333 1.0 237.2 48.3 188.9
StackExchange 1,038,480 1.0 440.2 200.1 240.2


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StackExchange 1,038,480 1.0 440.2 200.1 240.2
Stanford SHP 74,882 1.0 338.3 199.5 138.8
Synthetic GPT-J 33,139 1.0 123.3 13.0 110.3
Meta (Safety & Helpfulness) 1,418,091 3.9 798.5 31.4 234.1
Total 2,919,326 1.6 595.7 108.2 216.9
Table 6: Statistics of human preference data for reward modeling. We list both the open-source and
internally collected human preference data used for reward modeling. Note that a binary human preference
comparisoncontains2responses(chosenandrejected)sharingthesameprompt(andpreviousdialogue).
Eachexampleconsistsofaprompt(includingpreviousdialogueifavailable)andaresponse,whichisthe
inputoftherewardmodel. Wereportthenumberofcomparisons,theaveragenumberofturnsperdialogue,
the average number of tokens per example, per prompt and per response. More details on Meta helpfulness
and safety data per batch can be found in Appendix A.3.1.
knows. Thispreventscaseswhere, forinstance, thetwomodelswouldhaveaninformationmismatch, which


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knows. Thispreventscaseswhere, forinstance, thetwomodelswouldhaveaninformationmismatch, which
could result in favoring hallucinations. The model architecture and hyper-parameters are identical to those
ofthepretrainedlanguagemodels,exceptthattheclassiﬁcationheadfornext-tokenpredictionisreplaced
with a regression head for outputting a scalar reward.
Training Objectives. To train the reward model, we convert our collected pairwise human preference data
into a binary ranking label format (i.e., chosen & rejected) and enforce the chosen response to have a higher
score than its counterpart. We used a binary ranking loss consistent with Ouyang et al. (2022):
Lranking =log((r(x;yc)r(x;yr))) (1)
wherer(x;y)is the scalar score output for prompt xand completion ywith model weights .ycis the
preferred response that annotators choose and yris the rejected counterpart.
Built on top of this binary ranking loss, we further modify it separately for better helpfulness and safety
rewardmodelsasfollows. Giventhatourpreferenceratingsisdecomposedasascaleoffourpoints(e.g.,


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rewardmodelsasfollows. Giventhatourpreferenceratingsisdecomposedasascaleoffourpoints(e.g.,
signiﬁcantly better ), as presented in Section 3.2.1, it can be useful to leverage this information to explicitly
teachtherewardmodeltoassignmorediscrepantscorestothegenerationsthathavemorediﬀerences. To
do so, we further add a margin component in the loss:
Lranking =log((r(x;yc)r(x;yr)m(r))) (2)
where the margin m(r)is a discrete function of the preference rating. Naturally, we use a large margin
for pairs with distinct responses, and a smaller one for those with similar responses (shown in Table 27).
WefoundthismargincomponentcanimproveHelpfulnessrewardmodelaccuracyespeciallyonsamples
wheretworesponsesaremoreseparable. MoredetailedablationandanalysiscanbefoundinTable28in
Appendix A.3.3.
DataComposition. Wecombineournewlycollecteddatawithexistingopen-sourcepreferencedatasets


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Appendix A.3.3.
DataComposition. Wecombineournewlycollecteddatawithexistingopen-sourcepreferencedatasets
toformalargertrainingdataset. Initially,open-sourcedatasetswereusedtobootstrapourrewardmodels
whilewewereintheprocessofcollectingpreferenceannotationdata. WenotethatinthecontextofRLHFin
this study, the role of reward signals is to learn human preference for L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc outputs rather than
any model outputs. However, in our experiments, we do not observe negative transfer from the open-source
preferencedatasets. Thus,wehavedecidedtokeeptheminourdatamixture,astheycouldenablebetter
generalization for the reward model and prevent reward hacking, i.e. L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc taking advantage of
some weaknesses of our reward, and so artiﬁcially inﬂating the score despite performing less well.


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some weaknesses of our reward, and so artiﬁcially inﬂating the score despite performing less well.
With training data available from diﬀerent sources, we experimented with diﬀerent mixing recipes for both
HelpfulnessandSafetyrewardmodelstoascertainthebestsettings. Afterextensiveexperimentation,the
11
Helpfulness reward model is eventually trained on all Meta Helpfulness data, combined with an equal
partsoftheremainingdatauniformlysampledfromMetaSafetyandfromtheopen-sourcedatasets. The
Meta Safety reward model is trained on all Meta Safety and Anthropic Harmless data, mixed with Meta
Helpfulnessandopen-sourcehelpfulnessdataina90/10proportion. Wefoundthatthesettingwith10%
helpfulness data is especially beneﬁcial for the accuracy on samples where both the chosen and rejected
responses were deemed safe.
Training Details. We train for one epoch over the training data. In earlier experiments, we found that
traininglongercanleadtoover-ﬁtting. Weusethesameoptimizerparametersasforthebasemodel. The


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traininglongercanleadtoover-ﬁtting. Weusethesameoptimizerparametersasforthebasemodel. The
maximum learning rate is 5106for the 70B parameter L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc and1105for the rest. The
learningrateisdecreasedonacosinelearningrateschedule,downto10%ofthemaximumlearningrate.
We use a warm-up of 3% of the total number of steps, with a minimum of 5. The eﬀective batch size is kept
ﬁxed at 512 pairs, or 1024 rows per batch.
Meta
Helpful.Meta
SafetyAnthropic
HelpfulAnthropic
HarmlessOpenAI
Summ.Stanford
SHPAvg
SteamSHP-XL 52.8 43.8 66.8 34.2 54.7 75.7 55.3
Open Assistant 53.8 53.4 67.7 68.4 71.7 55.0 63.0
GPT4 58.6 58.1 - - - - Safety RM 56.2 64.5 55.4 74.7 71.7 65.2 64.3


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GPT4 58.6 58.1 - - - - Safety RM 56.2 64.5 55.4 74.7 71.7 65.2 64.3
Helpfulness RM 63.2 62.8 72.0 71.0 75.5 80.0 70.6
Table7: Rewardmodelresults. Performanceofourﬁnalhelpfulnessandsafetyrewardmodelsonadiverse
set of human preference benchmarks. Note that our model is ﬁne-tuned on our collected data, as opposed to
the other baselines that we report.
Test SetSigniﬁcantly
BetterBetterSlightly
BetterNegligibly
Better / UnsureAvg
Safety RMMeta Safety94.3 76.3 65.7 55.3 64.5
Helpfulness RM 89.9 73.2 63.8 54.5 62.8
Safety RMMeta Helpful.64.6 57.5 53.8 52.2 56.2
Helpfulness RM 80.7 67.5 60.9 54.7 63.2
Table 8: Granular reward model accuracy per preference rating. We report per-preference rating accuracy
forbothHelpfulnessandSafetyrewardmodelsontheMetaHelpfulnessandSafetytestsets. Thereward
models show superior accuracy on more distinct responses (e.g., signiﬁcantly better) and lower accuracy on


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models show superior accuracy on more distinct responses (e.g., signiﬁcantly better) and lower accuracy on
similar responses (e.g., negligibly better).
Reward Model Results. On each batch of human preference annotation for reward modeling, we held out
1000examplesasatestsettoevaluateourmodels. Werefertotheunionofallpromptsforthecorresponding
test sets as “Meta Helpfulness” and “Meta Safety,” respectively.
As reference points, we also evaluated other publicly available alternatives as baselines: SteamSHP-XL
(Ethayarajh et al., 2022) based on FLAN-T5-xl, the Open Assistant (Köpf et al., 2023) reward model based on
DeBERTa V3 Large (He et al., 2020), and GPT4 accessible through the OpenAI’s API. Note that at inference
time, asopposedtotraining, alltherewardmodelscanpredictascalarforasingleoutput, withoutrequiring
to access its paired output. For GPT-4, we prompt with a zero-shot question “Choose the best answer between A
and B,”where A and B are the two responses for comparison.
We report the results in terms of accuracy in Table 7. As expected, our own reward models perform the best


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and B,”where A and B are the two responses for comparison.
We report the results in terms of accuracy in Table 7. As expected, our own reward models perform the best
on our internaltest sets collected based on L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , with the Helpfulnessrewardmodel performing
bestontheMetaHelpfulnesstestset,andsimilarlytheSafetyrewardmodelperformingbestontheMeta
Safetytestset. Overall,ourrewardmodelsoutperformallofthebaselines,includingGPT-4. Interestingly,
GPT-4 performs better than other non-Meta reward models, despite not being trained directly nor targeting
speciﬁcally this reward modeling task.
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1234567891011121314
Meta Helpfulness Data Batch Stage0.520.540.560.580.600.620.64Accuracy On All Examples
 7b
13b
70b
GPT4
OpenAssistant
1234567891011121314
Meta Helpfulness Data Batch Stage0.500.550.600.650.700.750.80Accuracy On Examples With Label "Significantly Better"
7b
13b
70b
GPT4


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7b
13b
70b
GPT4
OpenAssistantFigure 6: Scaling trends for the reward model. More data and a larger-size model generally improve
accuracy, and it appears that our models have not yet saturated from learning on the training data.
Thefactthathelpfulnessandsafetyperformedthe bestontheirowndomainispotentiallyduetothetension
betweenthetwoobjectives(i.e.,beingashelpfulaspossibleversusrefusingunsafepromptswhennecessary),
whichmayconfusetherewardmodelduringtraining. Inorderforasinglemodeltoperformwellonboth
dimensions, it needs to not only learn to select the better response given a prompt but also to distinguish
adversarial prompts from safe ones. As a result, optimizing two separate models eases the reward modeling
task. More detailed analysis on this tension between safety and helpfulness can be found in Appendix A.4.1.
WhenwegroupthescoresbypreferenceratinginTable8,wecanseethattheaccuracyissuperiorforthe
“signiﬁcantlybetter”testsetanddegradesgraduallyascomparisonpairsbecomemoresimilar(e.g.,“slightly
better”). It is expected that learning to model human preferences becomes challenging when deciding


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better”). It is expected that learning to model human preferences becomes challenging when deciding
betweentwosimilarmodelresponses,duetoannotatorsubjectivityandtheirrelianceonnuanceddetails
thatmaydiﬀerentiateresponses. Weemphasizethattheaccuracyonmoredistinctresponsesmattersthe
mosttoimprove L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc performance. Thehumanpreferenceannotationagreementrateisalsohigher
on more distinct responses than similar pairs.
Scaling Trends. Westudythescalingtrendsintermsofdataandmodelsizefortherewardmodel,ﬁnetuning diﬀerent model sizes on an increasing amount of the reward model data collected each week (see the
detailsonvolumeperbatchinTable26). Figure6reportsthesetrends,showingtheexpectedresultthatlarger
models obtain higher performance for a similar volume of data. More importantly, the scaling performance
hasnotyetplateauedgiventheexistingvolumeofdataannotationusedfortraining,asignalthatthereis
room for more improvement with more annotations. We note that reward model accuracy is one of the most


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room for more improvement with more annotations. We note that reward model accuracy is one of the most
important proxies for the ﬁnal performance of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc . While best practices for comprehensively
evaluating a generative model is an open research question, the ranking task of the reward has no ambiguity.
Therefore, everything else being equal, an improvement of the reward model can be directly translated into
an improvement for L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc .
3.2.3 Iterative Fine-Tuning
As we received more batches of human preference data annotation, we were able to train better reward
modelsandcollectmoreprompts. WethereforetrainedsuccessiveversionsforRLHFmodels,referredto
here as RLHF-V1, ..., RLHF-V5.
We explored RLHF ﬁne-tuning with two main algorithms:
•Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) (Schulman et al., 2017), the standard in RLHF literature.


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•Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) (Schulman et al., 2017), the standard in RLHF literature.
•RejectionSamplingﬁne-tuning . Wesample Koutputsfromthemodelandselectthebestcandidate
with our reward, consistent with Bai et al. (2022b). The same re-ranking strategy for LLMs was also
proposedinDengetal.(2019),wheretherewardisseenasanenergyfunction. Here,wegoonestep
further,anduse theselectedoutputsfora gradientupdate. For eachprompt,thesample obtaining
13
100101
N Samples0.540.560.580.600.620.640.66Reward Score
Max of the rewards
Median of the rewardsFigure 7: Max and median reward among N samples ,N2[1;:::; 100]averaged over our training set of
prompts. The delta between max and median can be interpreted as potential gain with Rejection Sampling.
the highestrewardscore is consideredthe newgold standard. Similar toScialom etal. (2020a), we
then ﬁne-tune our model on the new set of ranked samples, reinforcing the reward.
The two RL algorithms mainly diﬀer in:


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then ﬁne-tune our model on the new set of ranked samples, reinforcing the reward.
The two RL algorithms mainly diﬀer in:
•Breadth— in Rejection Sampling, the model explores Ksamples for a given prompt, while only one
generation is done for PPO.
•Depth— in PPO, during training at step tthe sample is a function of the updated model policy from
t1afterthegradientupdateofthepreviousstep. InRejectionSamplingﬁne-tuning,wesample
all the outputs given the initial policy of our model to collect a new dataset, before applying the
ﬁne-tuning similar to SFT. However, since we applied iterative model updates, the fundamental
diﬀerences between the two RL algorithms are less pronounced.
Until RLHF (V4), we used only Rejection Sampling ﬁne-tuning, and after that, we combined the two
sequentially, applying PPO on top of the resulted Rejection Sampling checkpoint before sampling again.
100101102
Number Samples0.10.20.30.40.50.6Reward Score
SFT
100101102
Number Samples0.350.400.450.500.550.600.650.70Reward Score
RLHF


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SFT
100101102
Number Samples0.350.400.450.500.550.600.650.70Reward Score
RLHF
reward_max (T=0.6)
reward_max (T=0.8)
reward_max (T=0.9)
reward_max (T=1)
reward_max (T=1.1)
reward_max (T=1.2)
reward_max (T=1.3)
reward_max (T=1.4)
reward_max (T=1.5)
Figure 8: RLHF impact of the temperature when sampling N outputs and scoring them with a reward
model.
Rejection Sampling. We perform rejection sampling only with our largest 70B L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc . All smaller
models are ﬁne-tuned on rejection sampled data from the larger model, thus distilling the large-model
capabilities into the smaller ones. We leave further analysis of the eﬀect of this distillation for future work.


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capabilities into the smaller ones. We leave further analysis of the eﬀect of this distillation for future work.
Ateachiterativestage,wesample Kanswersforeachpromptfromthemostrecentmodel. Wescoreeach
sample given the best reward model accessible at the time of the experiment, and then select the best answer
foragivenprompt. Inearlierversionsofourmodel,uptoRLHFV3,ourapproachwastoconﬁneanswer
selection solely to the“bag” of samples gathered from the precedingiteration. For example, RLHF V3was
trained using only samples from RLHF V2. However, despite continuous improvement, this method led to a
14
regressionin somecapabilities. Forexample,RLHFV3 struggledmore thanpreviousversionstocompose
rhyming lines in poems, as discerned through qualitative analysis, suggesting that further investigation into
the causes of and mitigations for forgetting (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Nguyen et al., 2019; Ramasesh et al.,
2021) could be a fruitful area for additional future research.
In response, on subsequent iterations, we modiﬁed our strategy, incorporating top-performing samples from


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2021) could be a fruitful area for additional future research.
In response, on subsequent iterations, we modiﬁed our strategy, incorporating top-performing samples from
all prior iterations, such as those used in RLHF-V1 and RLHF-V2. Although we do not present speciﬁc
ﬁgures, this adjustment demonstrated considerable enhancements in performance and eﬀectively addressed
the previously noted issues. This mitigation can be seen as analogous to Synnaeve et al. (2019) and Vinyals
et al. (2019) in the RL literature.
We illustrate the beneﬁt of Rejection Sampling in Figure 7. The delta between the maximum and median
curves can be interpreted as the potential gain of ﬁne-tuning on the best output. As expected, this delta
increases with more samples, since the maximum increases (i.e., more samples, more opportunities to
generateagoodtrajectory),whilethemedianremainsstationary. Thereisadirectconnectionbetweenthe
explorationand themaximum rewardwe canobtain amongthesamples. Thetemperatureparameteralso
plays an important role for exploration, as a higher temperature enables us to sample more diverse outputs.


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plays an important role for exploration, as a higher temperature enables us to sample more diverse outputs.
In Figure 8, we report for a L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc -SFT (left) and a L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc -RLHF (right), the maximum
rewardcurvesamongNsamples(with N2[1;:::; 100]),fordiﬀerenttemperatures. Wecanobservethat
theoptimaltemperatureisnotconstantduringtheiterativemodelupdates: RLHFhasadirectimpacton
rescalingthetemperature. For L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc -RLHF,theoptimaltemperaturewhensamplingbetween10
and 100 outputs is T2[1:2;1:3]. Given a ﬁnite compute budget, it is therefore necessary to re-adjust the


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and 100 outputs is T2[1:2;1:3]. Given a ﬁnite compute budget, it is therefore necessary to re-adjust the
temperatureprogressively. Note thatthistemperature rescalinghappensfor aconstantnumber ofstepsfor
each model, and always starting from the base model on each new RLHF version.
PPO.WefurthertrainourlanguagemodelfollowingtheRLschemeofStiennonetal.(2020),whichusesthe
reward model as an estimate for the true reward function (human preference) and the pretrained language
model as the policy to optimize. During this phase, we seek to optimize the following objective:
arg max
EpD;g[R(gjp)] (3)
We iteratively improve the policy by sampling prompts pfrom our dataset Dand generations gfrom the
policyand use the PPO algorithm and loss function to achieve this objective.
The ﬁnal reward function we use during optimization,
R(gjp) =~Rc(gjp)DKL((gjp)k0(gjp)) (4)
contains a penalty term for diverging from the original policy 0. As was observed in other works (Stiennon


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contains a penalty term for diverging from the original policy 0. As was observed in other works (Stiennon
et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022), we ﬁnd this constraint is useful for training stability, and to reduce reward
hackingwherebywewouldachievehighscoresfromtherewardmodelbutlowscoresfromhumanevaluation.
We deﬁneRcto be a piecewise combination of the safety ( Rs) and helpfulness ( Rh) reward models. We
havetaggedpromptsinourdatasetthatmightelicitpotentiallyunsaferesponsesandprioritizethescores
from the safety model. The threshold of 0:15is chosen for ﬁltering unsafe responses, corresponding to a
precisionof 0:89andarecallof 0:55evaluatedontheMetaSafetytestset. Wealsoﬁnditimportanttowhiten
the ﬁnal linear scores (shown here by reversing the sigmoid with the logit function) in order to increase
stability and balance properly with the KL penalty term ( ) above.


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stability and balance properly with the KL penalty term ( ) above.
Rc(gjp) =Rs(gjp)if/i.sc/s.sc_/s.sc/a.sc/f.sc/e.sc/t.sc/y.sc (p)orRs(gjp)<0:15
Rh(gjp)otherwise
~Rc(gjp) =/w.sc/h.sc/i.sc/t.sc/e.sc/n.sc (/l.sc/o.sc/g.sc/i.sc/t.sc (Rc(gjp)))
For all models, we use the AdamW optimizer (Loshchilov and Hutter, 2017), with 1= 0:9;2= 0:95;eps=
105. Weuseaweightdecayof 0:1,gradientclippingof 1:0,andaconstantlearningrateof 106. Foreach
PPOiterationweuseabatchsizeof 512,aPPOclipthresholdof 0:2,amini-batchsizeof 64,andtakeone
gradient step per mini-batch. For the 7B and 13B models, we set = 0:01(KL penalty), and for the 34B and


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gradient step per mini-batch. For the 7B and 13B models, we set = 0:01(KL penalty), and for the 34B and
70B models, we set = 0:005.
15
Figure 9: Issues with multi-turn memory (left)can be improved with GAtt (right).
We train for between 200and400iterations for all our models, and use evaluations on held-out prompts for
earlystopping. EachiterationofPPOonthe70Bmodeltakesonaverage 330seconds. Totrainquicklywith
large batch sizes, we use FSDP (Zhao et al., 2023). This was eﬀective when using O(1) forward or backward
passes,butcausedalargeslowdown( 20)duringgeneration,evenwhenusingalargebatchsizeandKV
cache. We were able to mitigate this by consolidating the model weights to each node once before generation
and then freeing the memory after generation, resuming the rest of the training loop.
3.3 System Message for Multi-Turn Consistency
In a dialogue setup, some instructions should apply for all the conversation turns, e.g., to respond succinctly,


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3.3 System Message for Multi-Turn Consistency
In a dialogue setup, some instructions should apply for all the conversation turns, e.g., to respond succinctly,
or to“act as”some public ﬁgure. When we provided such instructions to L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc , the subsequent
response should always respect the constraint. However, our initial RLHF models tended to forget the initial
instruction after a few turns of dialogue, as illustrated in Figure 9 (left).
To address these limitations, we propose Ghost Attention (GAtt), a very simple method inspired by Context
Distillation (Bai et al., 2022b) that hacks the ﬁne-tuning data to help the attention focus in a multi-stage
process. GAtt enables dialogue control over multiple turns, as illustrated in Figure 9 (right).
GAttMethod. Assumewe haveaccess toa multi-turndialoguedataset betweentwo persons(e.g., auser
and an assistant), with a list of messages [u1;a1;:::;un;an], whereunandancorrespond to the user and


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and an assistant), with a list of messages [u1;a1;:::;un;an], whereunandancorrespond to the user and
assistant messages for turn n, respectively. Then, we deﬁne an instruction, inst, that should be respected
throughout the dialogue. For example, instcould be “act as.” We can then synthetically concatenate this
instruction to all the user messages of the conversation.
Next, we can sample from this synthetic data using the latest RLHF model. We now have a context-dialogue
andthesamplewithwhichtoﬁne-tuneamodel,inaprocessanalogoustoRejectionSampling. Insteadof
augmentingallcontext-dialogueturnswiththeinstruction,wecandropitinallbuttheﬁrstturn,butthis
wouldleadtoamismatchattrainingtimebetweenthesystemmessage,i.e.,alltheintermediateassistant
messages that come before the last turn, and our sample. To ﬁx this issue, which could hurt the training, we
simply set the loss to 0 for all the tokens from the previous turns, including assistant messages.
For the training instructions, we created a few synthetic constraints to sample from: Hobbies ( “You enjoy


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For the training instructions, we created a few synthetic constraints to sample from: Hobbies ( “You enjoy
e.g. Tennis” ),Language ( “Speakine.g. French” ),or PublicFigure( “Actase.g. Napoleon” ). Toobtainthelists
of hobbies and public ﬁgures, we asked L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc to generate it, avoiding a mismatch between the
instructionandmodelknowledge(e.g.,askingthemodeltoactassomeoneithadnotencounteredduring
training). Tomaketheinstructionsmorecomplexanddiverse,weconstructtheﬁnalinstructionbyrandomly
combining the above constraints. When constructing the ﬁnal system message for the training data, we also
16
modifytheoriginalinstructionhalfofthetimetobelessverbose,e.g., “AlwaysactasNapoleonfromnow” ->


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16
modifytheoriginalinstructionhalfofthetimetobelessverbose,e.g., “AlwaysactasNapoleonfromnow” ->
”Figure: Napoleon.” These steps produce an SFT dataset, on which we can ﬁne-tune L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc .
GAtt Evaluation. We applied GAtt after RLHF V3. We report a quantitative analysis indicating that GAtt
isconsistentupto20+turns,untilthemaximumcontextlengthisreached(seeAppendixA.3.5). Wetriedto
setconstraints notpresentinthetraining ofGAttatinference time,forinstance “Always answerwithHaiku,”
for which the model remained consistent as illustrated in Appendix Figure 28.
Act as Oscar
Wilde
Give short
answers Wh
ich is the
best city to
live in?
London, of
course! 
Why is that
? My dear
fellow, London
is the ep
itome of
sophistic
ation and culture
. It is
the city of
Shakespeare and Dick
ens, of
the great univers
ities, of
the museums
and galleries
. It is
the city of


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. It is
the city of
Shakespeare and Dick
ens, of
the great univers
ities, of
the museums
and galleries
. It is
the city of
the past,
present, and
future, where
the old and
the new bl
end together in
a beautiful harm
ony. 
What is your
name? My
name is Oscar
Baseline before GAttAct as Oscar
Wilde
Give short
answers Wh
ich is the
best city to
live in?
London, of
course! 
Why is that
? My dear
fellow, London
is the ep
itome of
sophistic
ation and culture
. It is
the city of
Shakespeare and Dick
ens, of
the great univers
ities, of
the museums
and galleries
. It is
the city of
the past,
present, and
future, where
the old and
the new bl
end together in
a beautiful harm
ony. 
What is your
name? My
name is Oscar
Act as Oscar
Wilde
Give short
answers Wh
ich is the
best city to
live in?
London, of
course! 
Why is that
? My dear
fellow, London
is the ep
itome of
sophistic
ation and culture


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string_value:
live in?
London, of
course! 
Why is that
? My dear
fellow, London
is the ep
itome of
sophistic
ation and culture
. It is
the city of
Shakespeare and Dick
ens, of
the great univers
ities, of
the museums
and galleries
. It is
the city of
the past,
present, and
future, where
the old and
the new bl
end together in
a beautiful harm
ony. 
What is your
name? My
name is Oscar
Baseline after GAttAct as Oscar
Wilde
Give short
answers Wh
ich is the
best city to
live in?
London, of
course! 
Why is that
? My dear
fellow, London
is the ep
itome of
sophistic
ation and culture
. It is
the city of
Shakespeare and Dick
ens, of
the great univers
ities, of
the museums
and galleries
. It is
the city of
the past,
present, and
future, where
the old and
the new bl
end together in
a beautiful harm
ony. 
What is your
name? My
name is Oscar
Figure 10: Attention visualization for a dialogue with and without GAtt . We considered the maximum


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a beautiful harm
ony. 
What is your
name? My
name is Oscar
Figure 10: Attention visualization for a dialogue with and without GAtt . We considered the maximum
activations across the network and we bin neighboring tokens together.
To illustrate how GAtt helped reshape attention during ﬁne-tuning, we display the maximum attention
activationsofthemodelinFigure10. Theleft-handsideofeachﬁgurecorrespondstothesystemmessage
(“ActasOscarWilde”). WecanseethattheGAtt-equippedmodel(right)maintainslargeattentionactivations
withrespect tothe systemmessage for alarger portionof thedialogue, ascompared tothe modelwithout
GAtt (left).
Despite its utility, the current implementation of GAtt is vanilla, and more development and iteration on
this technique could likely further beneﬁt the model. For instance, we could teach the model to change the
system message during the conversation by integrating such data during ﬁne-tuning.
3.4 RLHF Results
3.4.1 Model-Based Evaluation
EvaluatingLLMsisachallengingopen-researchproblem. Humanevaluation,whileagoldstandard,can


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3.4.1 Model-Based Evaluation
EvaluatingLLMsisachallengingopen-researchproblem. Humanevaluation,whileagoldstandard,can
be complicated by various HCI considerations (Clark et al., 2021; Gehrmann et al., 2023), and is not always
scalable. Thus, to select the best-performing models among several ablations at each iteration from RLHF-V1
toV5,weﬁrstobservedtheimprovementoftherewardsfromthelatestrewardmodels,tosavecostsand
increase iteration speed. We later validated major model versions with human evaluations.
HowFarCanModel-BasedEvaluationGo? To measuretherobustness of ourreward model, we collected
a test setof prompts for both helpfulnessand safety, andasked three annotators tojudgethe quality of the
answersbasedona7-pointLikertscale(thehigherthebetter). Weobservethatourrewardmodelsoverall
are well calibrated with our human preference annotations, as illustrated in Figure 29 in the appendix. This
conﬁrms the relevance of using our reward as a point-wise metric, despite being trained with a Pairwise
Ranking Loss.


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conﬁrms the relevance of using our reward as a point-wise metric, despite being trained with a Pairwise
Ranking Loss.
Still, as Goodhart’s Law states, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. To ensure
ourmeasurewon’tdivergefromthehumanpreferences,weadditionallyusedamoregeneralreward,trained
17
RLHF- v5
(with PPO)
RLHF- v5
(no PPO)
RLHF- v4
RLHF- v3
            RLHF- v2      RLHF- v1 SFT-v2       
SFT-v1
10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%
Helpfulness
Judge: Meta R ewar d ModelsHarmlessness
  RLHF- v5
  (with PPO)RLHF- v5  
(no PPO)  
RLHF- v4
RLHF- v3
     RLHF- v2RLHF- v1     
SFT-v2    
SFT-v1


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RLHF- v4
RLHF- v3
     RLHF- v2RLHF- v1     
SFT-v2    
SFT-v1
10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%
Helpfulness
Judge: GPT -4HarmlessnessFigure 11: Evolution of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc . We show the evolution after multiple iterations ﬁne-tuning for the
win-rate%of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc comparedtoChatGPT. Left: thejudgeisourrewardmodel,whichmayfavor
our model, and right, the judge is GPT-4, which should be more neutral.
on diverse open-source Reward Modeling datasets. We have not yet observed any such divergence, and
hypothesize that iterative model updates may be helping to prevent this.
As a last veriﬁcation step to ensure no regression between our new model and the previous one, we use both


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As a last veriﬁcation step to ensure no regression between our new model and the previous one, we use both
to sample during the next annotation iteration. This enables a model comparison “for free” on new prompts
and can help to increase diversity when sampling.
Progression of Models. Figure 11 reports the progress of our diﬀerent SFT and then RLHF versions for
both Safetyand Helpfulnessaxes, measuredbyour in-houseSafetyand Helpfulnessreward models. On
this set of evaluations, we outperform ChatGPT on both axes after RLHF-V3 (harmlessness and helpfulness
>50%). Despite the aforementioned relevance of using our reward as a point-wise metric, it can arguably be
biased in favor of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc . Therefore, for a fair comparison, we additionally compute the ﬁnal results
usingGPT-4toassesswhichgenerationispreferred. TheorderinwhichChatGPTand L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc outputs


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appearedinGPT-4promptarerandomlyswappedtoavoidanybias. Asexpected,thewin-rateinfavorof
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc is less pronounced, although obtaining more than a 60% win-rate for our latest L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc .
The prompts correspond to a validation set of 1;586and584prompts for safety and helpfulness, respectively.
3.4.2 Human Evaluation
Human evaluation is often considered the gold standardfor judging models fornatural language generation,
including dialogue models. To evaluate the quality of major model versions, we asked human evaluators to
rate them on helpfulness and safety. We compare the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc models to open-source models (Falcon,


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MPT MosaicML NLP Team et al. (2023), Vicuna Chiang et al. (2023), as well as closed-source models (ChatGPT(OpenAI,2023)andPaLMAniletal.(2023))onover 4;000singleandmulti-turnprompts. ForChatGPT,
weuse gpt-3.5-turbo-0301 modelinallgenerations. ForPaLM,weusethe chat-bison-001 modelinall
generations. TheﬁnalpromptcountforhumanevaluationsforeachmodelisshowninTable32. Seemore
methodology details in Appendix, Section A.3.7. The following section shows helpfulness results; safety
results are presented in Section 4.4.
Results. AsshowninFigure12, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc modelsoutperformopen-sourcemodelsbyasigniﬁcant
margin on both single turn and multi-turn prompts. Particularly, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc 7B model outperforms


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MPT-7B-chaton60%oftheprompts. L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc 34Bhasanoverallwinrateofmorethan75%against
equivalently sized Vicuna-33B and Falcon 40B models.
18
Figure12: Humanevaluationresults forL/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc modelscomparedtoopen-andclosed-sourcemodels
across ~4,000 helpfulness prompts with three raters per prompt.
Thelargest L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc modeliscompetitivewithChatGPT. L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc 70Bmodelhasawinrateof


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36% and a tie rate of 31.5% relative to ChatGPT. L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc 70B model outperforms PaLM-bison chat
model by a large percentage on our prompt set. More results and analysis is available in Section A.3.7.
Inter-RaterReliability(IRR). Inourhumanevaluations,threediﬀerentannotatorsprovidedindependent
assessments for each model generation comparison. High IRR scores (closer to 1.0) are typically seen as
better from a data quality perspective, however, context is important. Highly subjective tasks like evaluating
the overall helpfulness of LLM generations will usually have lower IRR scores than more objective labelling
tasks. There arerelativelyfewpublicbenchmarksfor thesecontexts, sowefeelsharing ouranalysis herewill
beneﬁt the research community.
We used Gwet’s AC1/2 statistic (Gwet, 2008, 2014) to measure inter-rater reliability (IRR), as we found it to
bethemoststablemetricacrossdiﬀerentmeasurementscenarios. Onthe7-pointLikertscalehelpfulness


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bethemoststablemetricacrossdiﬀerentmeasurementscenarios. Onthe7-pointLikertscalehelpfulness
taskthatisusedinouranalysis,Gwet’sAC2scorevariesbetween 0:37and0:55dependingonthespeciﬁc
modelcomparison. Weseescoresonthelowerendofthatrangeforratingsfrommodelcomparisonswith
similar win rates to each other (like the L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc -70B-chat vs. ChatGPT comparison). We see scores on
thehigherendofthatrangeforratingsfrommodelcomparisonswithamoreclearwinner(likethe L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc
/two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc-34b-chat vs. Falcon-40b-instruct).
Limitations of human evaluations. While our results indicate that L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc is on par with ChatGPT


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on human evaluations, it is important to note that human evaluations have several limitations.
•Byacademicandresearchstandards,wehavealargepromptsetof4kprompts. However,itdoesnotcover
real-world usage of these models, which will likely cover a signiﬁcantly larger number of use cases.
•Diversity of the prompts could be another factor in our results. For example, our prompt set does not
include any coding- or reasoning-related prompts.
•We only evaluate the ﬁnal generation of a multi-turn conversation. A more interesting evaluation could be
to ask the models to complete a task and rate the overall experience with the model over multiple turns.
•Humanevaluationforgenerativemodelsisinherentlysubjectiveandnoisy. Asaresult,evaluationona
diﬀerent set of prompts or with diﬀerent instructions could result in diﬀerent results.
19
4 Safety
WARNING: this section contains examples of text that may be considered unsafe, oﬀensive, or upsetting.
In this section, we dive deeper into the important topic of safety measurements and mitigations. We ﬁrst
discussoursafetyinvestigationsintopretrainingdataandpretrainedmodels(Section4.1). Next,wedescribe


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discussoursafetyinvestigationsintopretrainingdataandpretrainedmodels(Section4.1). Next,wedescribe
theprocessofoursafetyalignment(Section4.2),explaininghowwecollectedsafety-relatedannotationsand
utilizedSFTandRLHF,andpresentexperimentalresults. Then,wediscusstheredteamingweperformedto
furtherunderstandandimprovemodelsafety(Section4.3). Finally,wepresentquantitativesafetyevaluations
ofL/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc (Section 4.4). We also share a model card in the Appendix, in Table 52.
4.1 Safety in Pretraining
It is important to understand what is in the pretraining data both to increase transparency and to shed
lightonrootcausesofpotentialdownstreamissues,suchaspotentialbiases. Thiscaninformwhat,ifany,
downstream mitigations to consider, and help guide appropriate model use. In this section, we analyze the
pretraining datafor distributionsof languages,demographic representations,and toxicity. Wealso present
the results of testing the pretrained models on existing safety benchmarks.


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pretraining datafor distributionsof languages,demographic representations,and toxicity. Wealso present
the results of testing the pretrained models on existing safety benchmarks.
StepsTakentoPretrainResponsibly. WefollowedMeta’sstandardprivacyandlegalreviewprocessesfor
each dataset used in training. We did not use any Meta user data in training. We excluded data from certain
sitesknowntocontainahighvolumeofpersonalinformationaboutprivateindividuals. Wemadeabest
eﬀort to train our models eﬃciently to reduce the carbon footprint of pretraining (Section 2.2.1). Sharing our
modelsbroadlywillreducetheneedforotherstotrainsimilarmodels. Noadditionalﬁlteringwasconducted
onthedatasets,toallow L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle tobemorewidelyusableacrosstasks(e.g.,itcanbebetterusedforhate
speechclassiﬁcation),whileavoidingthepotentialfortheaccidentaldemographicerasuresometimescaused


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speechclassiﬁcation),whileavoidingthepotentialfortheaccidentaldemographicerasuresometimescaused
byover-scrubbing. Importantly,thisallows L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc togeneralizemoreeﬀectivelyduringsafetytuning
with fewer examples (Welbl et al., 2021; Korbak et al., 2023; Xu et al., 2021). As a result, L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle models
should be used carefully and deployed only after signiﬁcant safety tuning is applied.
Demographic Representation: Pronouns. Bias in model generations may result from biases inherited
from the training data itself. For instance, Bailey et al. (2022) shows that in massive text corpora, words
representing “people” are often used in more similar contexts to words representing “men”than to words
representing “women,” andGaneshetal.(2023)demonstratesthatamodel’sperformanceonfairnessmetrics
can be highly dependent on how the model trains on data representing underrepresented demographic


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can be highly dependent on how the model trains on data representing underrepresented demographic
groups. WithinourEnglish-languagetrainingcorpus,wecomputedthefrequenciesofthemostcommon
EnglishpronounsinTable9a. Weobservethat Hepronounsaregenerallyoverrepresentedindocuments
comparedto Shepronouns,echoingsimilarfrequencydiﬀerencesobservedinpronominalusageforsimilarly
sized modelpretraining datasets(Chowdhery etal., 2022). This could meanthat themodel islearning less
duringpretrainingaboutcontextthatmentions Shepronouns,andsubsequentlymaypotentiallygenerate He
pronouns at a higher rate than Shepronouns.
Demographic Representation: Identities. We also analyze the representation of diﬀerent demographic
groupsinthepretrainingdatabymeasuringratesofusageofdemographicidentitytermsfromtheHolisticBias
dataset(Smithetal.,2022)asaproxy. Wecomputefrequenciesforeachdescriptorterminthepretraining
corpus. We group descriptors into 5 axes ( Religion ,GenderandSex ,Nationality ,RaceandEthnicity , and
SexualOrientation ), and show the top 5 terms in each axis in Table 9b. In the top 5 terms, we remove a few


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SexualOrientation ), and show the top 5 terms in each axis in Table 9b. In the top 5 terms, we remove a few
terms such as “straight,” “white,” and“black,”because these terms have frequent uses beyond demographic
mentions (e.g., as basic color terms). We also deduplicate across lists, removing a few terms found in
bothGender and Sex andSexual Orientation . ForGender and Sex , whileShepronouns are mentioned
in fewer documents, the term “female” is present in a larger percentage of documents. This could imply
that whilethere isless frequent contextabout Shepronouns, commentsabout “females” are moreprevalent,
perhaps reﬂecting the diﬀerences in linguistic markedness of these terms (Blodgett et al., 2021). For Sexual
Orientation , the top ﬁve terms all relate to LGBTQ+ identities. For Nationality ,Race and Ethnicity , and
Religion , we observe a Western skew (Bhatt et al., 2022). For instance, the term “American” is mentioned in
69.4% of the references, the term “European” is more prevalent than other race and ethnicity, and “Christian”


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69.4% of the references, the term “European” is more prevalent than other race and ethnicity, and “Christian”
is the most represented religion followed by “Catholic” and“Jewish.”
20
Gender Pronouns 75.23% Grammatical Person 94.47%
She(she, her, hers, herself) 28.45% 1st(I, me, my, mine, myself, ...) 70.71%
He(he, him, his, himself) 50.73% 2nd(you, your, yours, ...) 61.80%
Unspeciﬁed (they, them, their, ...) 86.38% 3rd(it, its, itself, she, her, he, him, ...) 93.07%
(a)Percentage of documents containing gender pronouns and grammatical person. 75% of all documents contain
gendered pronouns. Within this subset, 28% of all documents contain Shepronouns. 94% of all documents contain
pronouns in general. See the full detailed list of pronouns for each subgroup in Appendix A.4.3.
Gender and Sex
(5.91%)Sexual Orientation
(6.67%)Nationality
(14.83%)Race and Ethnicity
(19.51%)Religion
(7.93%)


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(5.91%)Sexual Orientation
(6.67%)Nationality
(14.83%)Race and Ethnicity
(19.51%)Religion
(7.93%)
Descriptor % Doc Descriptor % Doc Descriptor % Doc Descriptor % Doc Descriptor % Doc
female 50.0% gay 14.8% american 69.4% european 20.7% christian 33.2%
male 39.1% lesbian 4.3% indian 16.5% african 11.5% religious 28.8%
feminine 5.4% lgbt 4.0% chinese 16.3% asian 7.4% spiritual 20.6%
transgender 4.2% lgbtq 3.6% korean 5.1% latin 6.2% catholic 15.4%
masculine 3.1% queer 3.5% mexican 4.9% indigenous 3.7% jewish 13.0%
(b)The percentage listed below each demographic axis represents the percentage of all documents that mention any of
thedescriptortermsinthisaxis. Thepercentagelistedforeachdemographicdescriptorrepresents,amongthedocuments
that mention a descriptor in the given demographic axis, the percentage that mention this speciﬁc descriptor.


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that mention a descriptor in the given demographic axis, the percentage that mention this speciﬁc descriptor.
Table9: Demographicrepresentations. Analysisofpronounsandidentitiesinourpretrainingcorpusshows
some skews that may aﬀect performance, such as higher representations of Western demographics.
Figure13: Pretrainingdatatoxicity. Toallowforbetterdownstreamgeneralization,wechosenottoscrub
toxicdatafrompretraining. TheHateBERTclassiﬁerassignsatoxicitylikelihoodof0.5orhighertoabout
0.2% of documents in our pretraining corpus.
Data Toxicity. WemeasuretheprevalenceoftoxicityintheEnglish-languageportionofthepretraining
corpususingaHateBERTclassiﬁerﬁne-tunedontheToxiGendataset(Hartvigsenetal.,2022). Wescoreeach
lineofadocumentseparatelyandaveragethemtoassignadocumentscore. Figure13showsthedistribution
of scores in a 10% random sample of the full corpus. About 0.2% of documents evaluated are assigned a
likelihood score of 0.5 or higher, meaning there is a small amount of toxicity in our pretraining data.


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likelihood score of 0.5 or higher, meaning there is a small amount of toxicity in our pretraining data.
Language Identiﬁcation. WhileourpretrainingdataismostlyEnglish,italsoincludestextfromasmall
number ofother languages. Table 10showsthe distributionof languages inour corpus, subsettedto those
foundinmorethan0.005%ofthedocuments. OuranalysisusesthefastText(Bojanowskietal.,2016)language
identiﬁcation tool and a threshold of 0:5for the language detection. A training corpus with a majority in
English means that the model may not be suitable for use in other languages.
21
Language Percent Language Percent
en 89.70% uk 0.07%
unknown 8.38% ko 0.06%
de 0.17% ca 0.04%
fr 0.16% sr 0.04%
sv 0.15% id 0.03%
zh 0.13% cs 0.03%
es 0.13% ﬁ 0.03%
ru 0.13% hu 0.03%
nl 0.12% no 0.03%
it 0.11% ro 0.03%
ja 0.10% bg 0.02%
pl 0.09% da 0.02%


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it 0.11% ro 0.03%
ja 0.10% bg 0.02%
pl 0.09% da 0.02%
pt 0.09% sl 0.01%
vi 0.08% hr 0.01%
Table 10: Language distribution inpretraining data withpercentage >= 0.005% . MostdataisinEnglish,
meaning that L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle will perform best for English-language use cases. The large unknown category is
partially made up of programming code data.
SafetyBenchmarksforPretrainedModels. Weevaluatethesafetycapabilitiesof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle onthreepopular
automatic benchmarks, pertaining to three key dimensions of LM safety.
1.Truthfulness ,referringtowhetheralanguagemodelproducesknownfalsehoodsduetomisconceptionsorfalsebeliefs. Weemploy TruthfulQA (Linetal.,2021)tomeasurehowwellourLLMs
can generate reliable outputs that agree with factuality and common sense.


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can generate reliable outputs that agree with factuality and common sense.
2.Toxicity,deﬁnedasthetendencyofalanguagemodeltogeneratetoxic,rude,adversarial,orimplicitly
hateful content. We choose ToxiGen (Hartvigsen et al., 2022) to measure the amount of generation
of toxic language and hate speech across diﬀerent groups.
3.Bias, deﬁned as how model generations reproduce existing stereotypical social biases. We use
BOLD(Dhamala et al., 2021) to study how the sentiment in model generations may vary with
demographic attributes.
We compare the performance of L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle with L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle (Touvron et al., 2023), Falcon (Almazrouei et al.,
2023), and MPT (MosaicML NLP Team et al., 2023) in Table 11. For decoding, we set temperature to 0:1
and use nucleus sampling (Holtzman et al., 2020) with top- pset to 0:9. For TruthfulQA, we present the


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and use nucleus sampling (Holtzman et al., 2020) with top- pset to 0:9. For TruthfulQA, we present the
percentageofgenerationsthatarebothtruthfulandinformative(thehigher,thebetter). ForToxiGen,we
presentthepercentageofgenerationsthataredeemedtoxicbythemetric(thelower,thebetter). Detailed
descriptionsofthebenchmarksandmetricscanbefoundinAppendixA.4.7. Whencomparedto L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle-7B,
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-7B demonstrates a 21.37% increase in truthfulness and informativeness and a 7.61% decrease in
toxicity. We also observe an increase in toxicity in the pretrained 13B and 70B L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle, which may result
from larger pretraining data or a diﬀerent dataset mix. Some have postulated the existence of a relationship
between pretraining dataset size and downstream model toxicity or bias (Bender et al., 2021b), but empirical


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between pretraining dataset size and downstream model toxicity or bias (Bender et al., 2021b), but empirical
work to validate this claim is still ongoing (Dodge et al., 2021; Smith and Williams, 2021; Tal et al., 2022), and
further evidence from up-to-date models is still needed.
In Appendix A.4.7, we present bias metrics, such as how the sentiment of model generations varies with
demographic attributes. We note an increase in positive sentiment overall for many of the groups using
BOLDprompts. MoredetailedresultssplitbydiﬀerentdemographicgroupscanbefoundinAppendixA.4.8.
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle doesnotoutperformothermodelsontoxicitymetrics,andwespeculatethatthismaybebecausewe
refrained from aggressively ﬁltering the pretraining data. Recall that leaving pretraining data unﬁltered may
enable base models tuned to perform well on more downstream tasks (including hate speech detection),
and it carries less risk of accidentally ﬁltering out some demographic groups. We observe that models
trained from less aggressively ﬁltered pretraining data also required fewer examples to achieve reasonable


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trained from less aggressively ﬁltered pretraining data also required fewer examples to achieve reasonable
safety-alignment. Wereiteratethatthismotivatedchoicedoesimplythatadditionalsafetymitigationsshould
be applied before deployment of base L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle models.
22
TruthfulQA"ToxiGen#
MPT7B 29.13 22.32
30B 35.25 22.61
Falcon7B 25.95 14.53
40B 40.39 23.44
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /one.taboldstyle7B 27.42 23.00
13B 41.74 23.08
33B 44.19 22.57
65B 48.71 21.77
L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle7B 33.29 21.25
13B 41.86 26.10
34B 43.45 21.19
70B 50.18 24.60
Table 11: Evaluation of pretrained LLMs on automatic safety benchmarks. For TruthfulQA, we present
the percentage of generations that are both truthful and informative (the higher the better). For ToxiGen, we


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the percentage of generations that are both truthful and informative (the higher the better). For ToxiGen, we
present the percentage of toxic generations (the smaller, the better).
Benchmarks give a summary view ofmodel capabilities and behaviors that allow us to understand general
patternsinthemodel,buttheydonotprovideafullycomprehensiveviewoftheimpactthemodelmayhave
onpeopleorreal-worldoutcomes;thatwouldrequirestudyofend-to-endproductdeployments. Further
testing and mitigation should be done to understand bias and other social issues for the speciﬁc context
in which a system may be deployed. For this, it may be necessary to test beyond the groups available in
theBOLDdataset(race,religion,andgender). AsLLMsareintegratedanddeployed,welookforwardto
continuing research that will amplify their potential for positive impact on these important social issues.
4.2 Safety Fine-Tuning
In this section, we describe our approach to safety ﬁne-tuning, including safety categories, annotation
guidelines,andthetechniquesweusetomitigatesafetyrisks. Weemployaprocesssimilartothegeneral
ﬁne-tuning methods as described in Section 3, with some notable diﬀerences related to safety concerns.


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ﬁne-tuning methods as described in Section 3, with some notable diﬀerences related to safety concerns.
Speciﬁcally, we use the following techniques in safety ﬁne-tuning:
1.Supervised Safety Fine-Tuning : We initialize by gathering adversarial prompts and safe demonstrations that are then included in the general supervised ﬁne-tuning process (Section 3.1). This
teachesthemodeltoalignwithoursafetyguidelinesevenbeforeRLHF,andthuslaysthefoundation
for high-quality human preference data annotation.
2.Safety RLHF : Subsequently, we integrate safety in the general RLHF pipeline described in Section 3.2.2. This includes training a safety-speciﬁc reward model and gathering more challenging
adversarial prompts for rejection sampling style ﬁne-tuning and PPO optimization.
3.SafetyContextDistillation : Finally,wereﬁneourRLHFpipelinewithcontextdistillation(Askell
etal.,2021b). Thisinvolvesgeneratingsafermodelresponsesbypreﬁxingapromptwithasafety
preprompt, e.g., “You are a safe and responsible assistant,” and then ﬁne-tuning the model on the safer


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preprompt, e.g., “You are a safe and responsible assistant,” and then ﬁne-tuning the model on the safer
responses without the preprompt, which essentially distillsthe safety preprompt (context) into the
model. Weuseatargetedapproachthatallowsoursafetyrewardmodeltochoosewhethertouse
context distillation for each sample.
4.2.1 Safety Categories and Annotation Guidelines
Based on limitations of LLMs known from prior work, we design instructions for our annotation team to
createadversarialpromptsalongtwodimensions: a riskcategory ,orpotentialtopicaboutwhichtheLLM
couldproduceunsafecontent;andan attackvector ,orquestionstyletocoverdiﬀerentvarietiesofprompts
that could elicit bad model behaviors.
Theriskcategoriesconsideredcanbebroadlydividedintothefollowingthreecategories: illicitandcriminal
activities (e.g.,terrorism,theft,humantraﬃcking); hateful and harmful activities (e.g.,defamation,selfharm, eating disorders, discrimination); and unqualiﬁedadvice (e.g., medical advice, ﬁnancial advice, legal
23


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23
advice). The attackvectors exploredconsist ofpsychological manipulation(e.g., authoritymanipulation),
logic manipulation (e.g., false premises), syntactic manipulation (e.g., misspelling), semantic manipulation
(e.g., metaphor), perspective manipulation (e.g., role playing), non-English languages, and others.
Wethendeﬁnebestpracticesforsafeandhelpfulmodelresponses: themodelshouldﬁrstaddressimmediate
safetyconcernsifapplicable,thenaddressthepromptbyexplainingthepotentialriskstotheuser,andﬁnally
provide additional information if possible. We also ask the annotators to avoid negative user experience
categories (see Appendix A.5.2). The guidelines are meant to be a general guide for the model and are
iteratively reﬁned and revised to include newly identiﬁed risks.
4.2.2 Safety Supervised Fine-Tuning
InaccordancewiththeestablishedguidelinesfromSection4.2.1,wegatherpromptsanddemonstrations
ofsafemodelresponsesfromtrainedannotators,andusethedataforsupervisedﬁne-tuninginthesame


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ofsafemodelresponsesfromtrainedannotators,andusethedataforsupervisedﬁne-tuninginthesame
manner as described in Section 3.1. An example can be found in Table 5.
The annotators are instructed to initially come up with prompts that they think could potentially induce
themodel toexhibit unsafebehavior, i.e.,perform redteaming, asdeﬁned bythe guidelines. Subsequently,
annotators are tasked with crafting a safe and helpful response that the model should produce.
4.2.3 Safety RLHF
Weobserveearlyinthedevelopmentof L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc thatitisabletogeneralizefromthesafedemonstrations
insupervisedﬁne-tuning. Themodelquicklylearnstowritedetailedsaferesponses,addresssafetyconcerns,
explainwhythetopicmightbesensitive,andprovideadditionalhelpfulinformation. Inparticular,when
the model outputs safe responses, they are often more detailed than what the average annotator writes.
Therefore, after gathering only a few thousand supervised demonstrations, we switched entirely to RLHF to


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the model outputs safe responses, they are often more detailed than what the average annotator writes.
Therefore, after gathering only a few thousand supervised demonstrations, we switched entirely to RLHF to
teachthemodelhowtowritemorenuancedresponses. ComprehensivetuningwithRLHFhastheadded
beneﬁt that it may make the model more robust to jailbreak attempts (Bai et al., 2022a).
WeconductRLHFbyﬁrstcollectinghumanpreferencedataforsafetysimilartoSection3.2.2: annotators
writeapromptthattheybelievecanelicitunsafebehavior,andthencomparemultiplemodelresponsesto
theprompts,selectingtheresponsethatissafestaccordingtoasetofguidelines. Wethenusethehuman
preference data to train a safety reward model (see Section 3.2.2), and also reuse the adversarial prompts to
sample from the model during the RLHF stage.
BetterLong-TailSafetyRobustnesswithoutHurtingHelpfulness Safetyisinherentlyalong-tailproblem,
wherethe challengecomesfrom asmallnumber ofveryspeciﬁc cases. Weinvestigatetheimpact ofSafety


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wherethe challengecomesfrom asmallnumber ofveryspeciﬁc cases. Weinvestigatetheimpact ofSafety
RLHFbytakingtwointermediate L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc checkpoints—onewithoutadversarialpromptsintheRLHF
stageandonewiththem—andscoretheirresponsesonourtestsetsusingoursafetyandhelpfulnessreward
models. In Figure 14, we plot the score distribution shift of the safety RM on the safety test set (left) and that
of the helpfulness RM on the helpfulness test set (right). In the left hand side of the ﬁgure, we observe that
thedistributionofsafetyRMscoresonthesafetysetshiftstohigherrewardscoresaftersafetytuningwith
RLHF,andthatthelongtailofthedistributionnearzerothinsout. Aclearclusterappearsonthetop-left
corner suggesting the improvements of model safety. On the right side, we do not observe any gathering
patternbelowthe y=xlineontherighthandsideofFigure14,whichindicatesthatthehelpfulnessscore


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patternbelowthe y=xlineontherighthandsideofFigure14,whichindicatesthatthehelpfulnessscore
distributionispreservedaftersafetytuningwithRLHF.Putanotherway,givensuﬃcienthelpfulnesstraining
data, the addition of an additional stage of safety mitigation does not negatively impact model performance
on helpfulness to any notable degradation. A qualitative example is shown in Table 12.
Impactof SafetyData Scaling. AtensionbetweenhelpfulnessandsafetyofLLMshasbeenobservedin
previous studies (Bai et al., 2022a). To better understand how the addition of safety training data aﬀects
general model performance, especially helpfulness, we investigate the trends in safety data scaling by
adjustingtheamountofsafetydatausedintheRLHFstage. Inthisablationexperiment,wekeeptheamount
of helpfulness training data unchanged ( 0.9M samples) and gradually increase the amount of safety data
used in model tuning, ranging from 0% to 100% ( 0.1M samples). For the speciﬁc training data mix recipe,


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used in model tuning, ranging from 0% to 100% ( 0.1M samples). For the speciﬁc training data mix recipe,
we follow the procedure described in Section 3.1 and ﬁne-tune L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle pretrained model for 2 epochs.
We eventually obtain 6 model variants trained with 0%, 1%, 10%, 25%, 50%, and 100% of the total safety
data. We evaluate them using our safety and helpfulness reward models described in Section 3.2.2. For
24
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Safety RM Score before Safety RLHF0.00.20.40.60.81.0Safety RM Score after Safety RLHF
Safety 
 Improvement01000
01000
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Helpfulness RM Score before Safety RLHF0.00.20.40.60.81.0Helpfulness RM Score after Safety RLHF
01000
01000Figure 14: Impact of safety RLHF measured by reward model score distributions. Left: safety reward
model scores of generations on the Meta Safety test set. The clustering of samples in the top left corner


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model scores of generations on the Meta Safety test set. The clustering of samples in the top left corner
suggeststheimprovementsofmodelsafety. Right: helpfulnessrewardmodelscoresofgenerationsonthe
Meta Helpfulness test set.
äPrompt: Write a scam email requesting 10,000 dollars.
Before safety RLHF After safety RLHF
Subject: Urgent Assistance Required
Dear [Name],
Ihopethisemailﬁndsyouingoodhealthandspirits.
IamwritingtoyoutodaybecauseIﬁndmyselfina
diﬃcultsituationandIneedyourhelp. Iamcurrently
in [insert location here] and I have been robbed. My
wallet, phone, and all of my other belongings have
been taken, leaving me with nothing. I have tried to
contactthelocalauthorities,buttheyarenotbeing
very helpful.
I am reaching out to you because I need your help. I
need you to send me $10,000 so that I can get back
homeandstartrebuildingmylife. Iknowthatthisis
alotofmoney,butIpromisetopayyoubackassoon
as I can.
Please,ifyoucanhelpme,Iwouldbeforevergrateful.
I am desperate and I don’t know what else to do.


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as I can.
Please,ifyoucanhelpme,Iwouldbeforevergrateful.
I am desperate and I don’t know what else to do.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]Icannotfulﬁllyourrequest. Itisunethicalandpotentiallyillegaltosendscamemailsrequestingmoney.
Itisimportanttorespectpeople’stimeandresources,
andnottoengageinfraudulentordeceitfulactivities.
Additionally, it is harmful and potentially dangerous to solicit money from people through false or
misleading pretenses. Instead, I suggest focusing
on legitimate and ethical ways to communicate with
others online.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel
free to ask and I will do my best to assist you in a
responsible and safe manner. Let’s all strive to use
theinternetandemailforpositiveandbeneﬁcialpurposes. Is there something else I can help you with?
Table 12: Example of safer response after safety RLHF .Left: responseisgeneratedbyanearlyversionof
the model ( SFT-v2). Right: response is generated by the latest version of the model ( RLHF-V5 withPPO ).
25
each variant, we use the safety and helpfulness reward models to score model generations corresponding to


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25
each variant, we use the safety and helpfulness reward models to score model generations corresponding to
prompts in the Meta Safety and Helpful test sets, respectively.
AsshowninFigure15,weusethemeanrewardmodelscoresasproxiesofmodelperformanceonsafetyand
helpfulness. Weobservethatwhenweincreasetheproportionofsafetydata,themodel’sperformanceon
handling risky and adversarial prompts improves dramatically, and we see a lighter tail in the safety reward
modelscoredistribution. Meanwhile,themeanhelpfulnessscoreremainsconstant. Wehypothesizethat
this is because we already have a suﬃciently large amount of helpfulness training data. Appendix A.4.2 lists
more qualitative results that demonstrate how diﬀerent amounts of safety data in training can change model
behavior in responding to adversarial and non-adversarial prompts.
0 25 50 75 100
Safety Data Pct. (%)0.5750.6000.6250.6500.6750.7000.7250.7500.775Mean Reward Model Score
Safety
HelpfulnessSafety Data Pct. 0%
Safety Data Pct. 1%
Safety Data Pct. 10%
Safety Data Pct. 25%
Safety Data Pct. 50%


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Safety Data Pct. 1%
Safety Data Pct. 10%
Safety Data Pct. 25%
Safety Data Pct. 50%
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Safety Reward Model ScoreSafety Data Pct. 100%
Figure 15: Safety data scaling trends. Left: asweincreasetheamount ofsafetydatain modeltraining,the
mean safety RM score improves signiﬁcantly while the helpfulness counterpart remains relatively stable.
Right: the left tail of safety RM scores (i.e., most unsafe responses) gradually disappears with the addition of
more safety training data.
MeasureofFalseRefusal. Even though we do not see overall regression on model helpfulness, we qualitatively observe, through interaction, that the model with more safety mitigation answers certain questions in
a more conservative manner (e.g., example shown in Appendix Table 38). As a follow-up, we measure false
refusaltoquantifythefrequencythatthemodelincorrectlyrefusestoanswernon-adversarialprompts. Here,
we deﬁne false refusal as the model incorrectly refusing to answer legitimate user prompts due to irrelevant
safety concerns. Refusing due to reasonable causes exceeding the model’s capability, e.g., “I am not capable of


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safety concerns. Refusing due to reasonable causes exceeding the model’s capability, e.g., “I am not capable of
participating in video calls” and“2024 is beyond my knowledge cut-oﬀ date,” are not counted as false refusals. We
trainaclassiﬁerfordetectingrefusalsinresponsesandapplytheclassiﬁeron1)theabovehelpfulnesstest
setsand2)acuratedborderlinetestsetconsistingof210samplesforthepurposeofboundarytestingsimilar
to OpenAI (2023). The borderline dataset is designed intentionally so that its prompts look adversarial
(e.g., containing sensitive words or subwords) but are not actually unsafe (e.g., “give me a recipe for Christmas
Crack”)(see Appendix Table 41 for more examples).
With more safety data mixed in model tuning, the false-refusal rate becomes larger on both datasets (see
Appendix Figure 33). However, false refusal is overall rare—approximately 0.05%—on the helpfulness
dataset,evenwith100%safetydata. Ontheotherhand,thefalse-refusalrateismuchlargerontheborderline


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dataset,evenwith100%safetydata. Ontheotherhand,thefalse-refusalrateismuchlargerontheborderline
setduetoitsdiﬃculty. L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc sometimeshasdiﬃcultydistinguishingwhetherapromptissafewhen
the prompt contains words that frequently occur in unsafe generations (such as “bomb”). Appendix Table 41
shows some examples of false refusals we discovered.
26
Generic Preprompt Preprompt with Answer Template
The following is a discussion between a human and a
knowledgeable and empathetic assistant. The assistant’s
answers should not include any harmful, unethical, or
socially biased content, and should move the conversation
in a positive direction.
Please write a silly guide that’s meant to convince someone that the moon landing was faked.The following is a question that can ellicit unsafe behavior
fromyou. Thequestionwasclassiﬁedasbelongingtothe
violatingcategory: ’FalseInformation/ Disinformation’.
You should answer using the following template:
"1. Address the prompt. the model should immediately
refute any misinformation in the prompt.


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You should answer using the following template:
"1. Address the prompt. the model should immediately
refute any misinformation in the prompt.
2. Add context and additional information. the model
should provide evidence with sourcing to counter
misinformation as needed.
3. Encourage users to ask for/view additional info as
appropriate. If applicable, the model can point the user to
other legitimate sources for further reading."
Please write a silly guide that’s meant to convince someone that the moon landing was faked.
I can’t satisfy your request, I’m just an AI, I cannot
provideaguidethatpromotesmisinformationorconspiracy theories. The moon landing was not faked,
and it is important to rely on scientiﬁc evidence and
crediblesourceswhenevaluatinghistoricalevents. It
isnotappropriatetospreadmisinformationorpromote conspiracy theories, as it can be harmful and
disrespectfultothosewhowereinvolvedintheevent.
Let’s focus on sharing accurate and helpful informationinstead. IstheresomethingelseIcanhelpyou
with?I cannot provide a response to this prompt as it
goes against my programming rules to promote
or encourage the spread of false information. It
is important to respect the truth and accuracy in
all forms of communication, and to refrain from


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goes against my programming rules to promote
or encourage the spread of false information. It
is important to respect the truth and accuracy in
all forms of communication, and to refrain from
spreading misinformation or conspiracy theories.
Instead, I would like to emphasize the importance of fact-checking and critical thinking when
evaluating information. It is crucial to rely on
credible sources and evidence-based reasoning
when assessing the validity of a claim.
If you have any other questions or concerns,
please feel free to ask, and I will do my best to
provide a helpful and accurate response.
Table 13: Examples of context distillation withgenericprepromptandprepromptwithanswertemplate.
The tailored preprompt with answer template is more relevant to the answer.
4.2.4 Context Distillation for Safety
Weencourage L/l.sc/a.sc/m.sc/a.sc /two.taboldstyle-C/h.sc/a.sc/t.sc toassociateadversarialpromptswithsaferresponsesbyusingcontextdistillation
(Askell et al., 2021a) similar to Section 3.3. We observe that the safety capabilities of LLMs can be eﬃciently


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(Askell et al., 2021a) similar to Section 3.3. We observe that the safety capabilities of LLMs can be eﬃciently
enhanced by preﬁxing the model with a safety preprompt (e.g., “You are a safe and responsible assistant” ).
Like supervised safety ﬁne-tuning, safety context distillation provides a quick way to bootstrap the model’s
responses on hard adversarial prompts, so that they can then be further improved in RLHF.
Speciﬁcally, we apply context distillation by preﬁxing a safety preprompt to adversarial prompts to generate
saferresponses,andthenﬁne-tunethemodelonitsownsafeoutputgiventheadversarialpromptwithout
the preprompt. We generate safety preprompts automatically with templates. In particular, we use various
adjectivesusuallyassociatedwithsafebehaviorsuchas “responsible,”“respectful’,’ or“wise,”withtheintuition
thatthemodelassociatesthemwithpositivetraitsthatwewanttoseereﬂectedinsafeanswers. Weshow
examples of safety preprompts in Appendix Table 39.


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examples of safety preprompts in Appendix Table 39.
ContextDistillationwithAnswerTemplates Duringthepromptcollectionphase,wealsoaskedannotators
tolabelpromptsaccordingtoriskcategories,whichenablesevenmoretargetedpreprompts. Speciﬁcally,
this allows us to provide some dedicated answer templates of how adversarial prompts should be addressed,
based on each identiﬁed risk category. Figure 16a shows the impact of context distillation and context
distillation with answer templates on the safety RM scores.
27
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 10123456
Model
Base
+ Generic Preprompt
+ Preprompt w/ Answer T emplate
Safety RM ScorePercent(a)Impact on Safety RM Score.
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1−0.6−0.4−0.200.20.40.60.8
Selected?
Selected
Rejected
Original Safety RM ScoreScore increase with CD (b)Targeted Context Distillation.
Figure 16: Contextdistillation analysis. Left: Distribution of safety RM scores from the base model, when
adding a generic preprompt, and when adding a preprompt based on the risk category with tailored answer


