{"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/ensemble-transformer-for-efficient-and","title":"Ensemble Transformer for Efficient and Accurate Ranking Tasks: an Application to Question Answering Systems","arxiv_id":"2201.05767","date":"2022-01-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yoshitomo Matsubara","Luca Soldaini","Eric Lind","Alessandro Moschitti"],"abstract":"Large transformer models can highly improve Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) tasks, but their high computational costs prevent their use in many real-world applications. In this paper, we explore the following research question: How can we make the AS2 models more accurate without significantly increasing their model complexity? To address the question, we propose a Multiple Heads Student architecture (named CERBERUS), an efficient neural network designed to distill an ensemble of large transformers into a single smaller model. CERBERUS consists of two components: a stack of transformer layers that is used to encode inputs, and a set of ranking heads; unlike traditional distillation technique, each of them is trained by distilling a different large transformer architecture in a way that preserves the diversity of the ensemble members. The resulting model captures the knowledge of heterogeneous transformer models by using just a few extra parameters. We show the effectiveness of CERBERUS on three English datasets for AS2; our proposed approach outperforms all single-model distillations we consider, rivaling the state-of-the-art large AS2 models that have 2.7x more parameters and run 2.5x slower. Code for our model is available at https://github.com/amazon-research/wqa-cerberus","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05767v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.05767v2.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":"ensemble-transformer-for-efficient-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/amazon-research/wqa-cerberus","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"efficient-neural-network","task_name":"Efficient Neural Network"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2201.05767","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2201.05767","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}