Indexing Highly Repetitive String Collections

Two decades ago, a breakthrough in indexing string collections made it possible to represent them within their compressed space while at the same time offering indexed search functionalities. As this new technology permeated through applications like bioinformatics, the string collections experienced a growth that outperforms Moore's Law and challenges our ability of handling them even in compressed form. It turns out, fortunately, that many of these rapidly growing string collections are highly repetitive, so that their information content is orders of magnitude lower than their plain size. The statistical compression methods used for classical collections, however, are blind to this repetitiveness, and therefore a new set of techniques has been developed in order to properly exploit it. The resulting indexes form a new generation of data structures able to handle the huge repetitive string collections that we are facing. In this survey we cover the algorithmic developments that have led to these data structures. We describe the distinct compression paradigms that have been used to exploit repetitiveness, the fundamental algorithmic ideas that form the base of all the existing indexes, and the various structures that have been proposed, comparing them both in theoretical and practical aspects. We conclude with the current challenges in this fascinating field

A Unified View of Long-Sequence Models towards Modeling Million-Scale Dependencies

Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is attributable to positional encoding and multi-head attention. However, Transformers fall short in learning long-range dependencies mainly due to the quadratic complexity scaled with context length, in terms of both time and space. Consequently, over the past five years, a myriad of methods has been proposed to make Transformers more efficient. In this work, we first take a step back, study and compare existing solutions to long-sequence modeling in terms of their pure mathematical formulation. Specifically, we summarize them using a unified template, given their shared nature of token mixing. Through benchmarks, we then demonstrate that long context length does yield better performance, albeit application-dependent, and traditional Transformer models fall short in taking advantage of long-range dependencies. Next, inspired by emerging sparse models of huge capacity, we propose a machine learning system for handling million-scale dependencies. As a proof of concept, we evaluate the performance of one essential component of this system, namely, the distributed multi-head attention. We show that our algorithm can scale up attention computation by almost $40\times$ using four GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs, compared to vanilla multi-head attention mechanism. We believe this study is an instrumental step towards modeling million-scale dependencies.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

At the Roots of Dictionary Compression : String Attractors

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