Papers › Adaptive Input Representations for Neural Language Modeling

Adaptive Input Representations for Neural Language Modeling

28 Sep 2018ICLR 2019 5arXiv:1809.10853archive 2025-07-28

Alexei Baevski, Michael Auli

We introduce adaptive input representations for neural language modeling which extend the adaptive softmax of Grave et al. (2017) to input representations of variable capacity. There are several choices on how to factorize the input and output layers, and whether to model words, characters or sub-word units. We perform a systematic comparison of popular choices for a self-attentional architecture. Our experiments show that models equipped with adaptive embeddings are more than twice as fast to train than the popular character input CNN while having a lower number of parameters. On the WikiText-103 benchmark we achieve 18.7 perplexity, an improvement of 10.5 perplexity compared to the previously best published result and on the Billion Word benchmark, we achieve 23.02 perplexity.

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Code

pytorch/fairseq officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
AranKomat/adapinp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
yuhao318/UP-ViT mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage Modelling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Language Modelling One Billion Word Adaptive Input Very Large Number of params 1.0B #7 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling One Billion Word Adaptive Input Very Large PPL 23.02 #7 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling One Billion Word Adaptive Input Very Large Validation perplexity 22.92 #7 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling One Billion Word Adaptive Input Large Number of params 0.46B #11 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling One Billion Word Adaptive Input Large PPL 23.91 #11 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling One Billion Word Adaptive Input Large Validation perplexity 23.83 #11 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 Transformer (Adaptive inputs) Number of params 247M #40 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 Transformer (Adaptive inputs) Test perplexity 18.70 #40 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 Transformer (Adaptive inputs) Validation perplexity 17.97 #40 of 89 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Introduced by this paper: Adaptive Input Representations

Adaptive Input RepresentationsAdaptive SoftmaxSoftmax

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