Papers › Graph Convolutions Enrich the Self-Attention in Transformers!

Graph Convolutions Enrich the Self-Attention in Transformers!

7 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.04234archive 2025-07-28

Jeongwhan Choi, Hyowon Wi, Jayoung Kim, Yehjin Shin, Kookjin Lee, Nathaniel Trask, Noseong Park

Transformers, renowned for their self-attention mechanism, have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, time-series modeling, etc. However, one of the challenges with deep Transformer models is the oversmoothing problem, where representations across layers converge to indistinguishable values, leading to significant performance degradation. We interpret the original self-attention as a simple graph filter and redesign it from a graph signal processing (GSP) perspective. We propose a graph-filter-based self-attention (GFSA) to learn a general yet effective one, whose complexity, however, is slightly larger than that of the original self-attention mechanism. We demonstrate that GFSA improves the performance of Transformers in various fields, including computer vision, natural language processing, graph-level tasks, speech recognition, and code classification.

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add_lang_by_task jeongwhanchoi/gfsa/Code/_utils.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 2e3e72e1e860afb2 · report
convert_clone_examples_to_features jeongwhanchoi/gfsa/Code/_utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 08ffc47da0ae6767 · report
convert_examples_to_features jeongwhanchoi/gfsa/Code/_utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 70674cae33ae9c61 · report
get_key_padding_mask jeongwhanchoi/gfsa/Speech/gfsa/Transformer.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · a0f4361e32b5e060 · report
get_lookahead_mask jeongwhanchoi/gfsa/Speech/gfsa/Transformer.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 15e543ee1a31804e · report
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Tasks

Clone DetectionCode ClassificationDefect DetectionGraph RegressionImage ClassificationSpeech RecognitionTime Seriesspeech-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Graph Regression PCQM4M-LSC Graphormer + GFSA Validation MAE 0.1193 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Regression PCQM4Mv2-LSC Graphormer + GFSA Validation MAE 0.0860 #12 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet Swin-S + GFSA Top 1 Accuracy 83% #474 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet CaiT-S + GFSA Top 1 Accuracy 82.8% #495 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet DeiT-S-24 + GFSA Top 1 Accuracy 81.5% #632 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet DeiT-S-12 + GFSA Top 1 Accuracy 81.1% #661 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech 100h test-clean Branchformer + GFSA Word Error Rate (WER) 9.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech 100h test-other Branchformer + GFSA Word Error Rate (WER) 22.25 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean Branchformer + GFSA Word Error Rate (WER) 2.11 #31 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other Branchformer + GFSA Word Error Rate (WER) 4.94 #29 of 53 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGFSALabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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