Papers › Betti numbers of attention graphs is all you really need

Betti numbers of attention graphs is all you really need

5 Jul 2022arXiv:2207.01903archive 2025-07-28

Laida Kushnareva, Dmitri Piontkovski, Irina Piontkovskaya

We apply methods of topological analysis to the attention graphs, calculated on the attention heads of the BERT model ( arXiv:1810.04805v2 ). Our research shows that the classifier built upon basic persistent topological features (namely, Betti numbers) of the trained neural network can achieve classification results on par with the conventional classification method. We show the relevance of such topological text representation on three text classification benchmarks. For the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to analyze the topology of an attention-based neural network, widely used for Natural Language Processing.

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AllClassificationText Classificationtext-classification

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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