{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/converting-transformers-into-dgnns-form-1","title":"Converting Transformers into DGNNs Form","arxiv_id":"2502.00585","date":"2025-02-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jie Zhang","Kuan-Chieh Wang","Bo-Wei Chiu","Min-Te Sun"],"abstract":"Recent advances in deep learning have established Transformer architectures as the predominant modeling paradigm. Central to the success of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism, which scores the similarity between query and key matrices to modulate a value matrix. This operation bears striking similarities to digraph convolution, prompting an investigation into whether digraph convolution could serve as an alternative to self-attention. In this study, we formalize this concept by introducing a synthetic unitary digraph convolution based on the digraph Fourier transform. The resulting model, which we term Converter, effectively converts a Transformer into a Directed Graph Neural Network (DGNN) form. We have tested Converter on Long-Range Arena benchmark, long document classification, and DNA sequence-based taxonomy classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that Converter achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency and architectural simplicity, which establishes it as a lightweight yet powerful Transformer variant.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00585v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00585v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"converting-transformers-into-dgnns-form-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/hazdzz/Converter","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"},{"task_slug":"document-classification","task_name":"Document Classification"},{"task_slug":"form","task_name":"Form"},{"task_slug":"graph-neural-network","task_name":"Graph Neural Network"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"graph-neural-network","method_name":"Graph Neural Network"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/long-range-modeling-on-lra","task":"Long-range modeling","dataset":"LRA","model":"Converter","rank_in_archive_order":3,"of":7,"metrics":{"Avg":"75.94","Image":"61.02","ListOps":"60.38","Pathfinder":"88.43","Retrieval":"83.41","Text":"86.44"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}