Papers › Investigating Recurrent Transformers with Dynamic Halt

Investigating Recurrent Transformers with Dynamic Halt

1 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.00976archive 2025-07-28

Jishnu Ray Chowdhury, Cornelia Caragea

In this paper, we comprehensively study the inductive biases of two major approaches to augmenting Transformers with a recurrent mechanism: (1) the approach of incorporating a depth-wise recurrence similar to Universal Transformers; and (2) the approach of incorporating a chunk-wise temporal recurrence like Temporal Latent Bottleneck. Furthermore, we propose and investigate novel ways to extend and combine the above methods - for example, we propose a global mean-based dynamic halting mechanism for Universal Transformers and an augmentation of Temporal Latent Bottleneck with elements from Universal Transformer. We compare the models and probe their inductive biases in several diagnostic tasks, such as Long Range Arena (LRA), flip-flop language modeling, ListOps, and Logical Inference. The code is released in: https://github.com/JRC1995/InvestigatingRecurrentTransformers/tree/main

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DiagnosticLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingListOps

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerUniversal Transformer

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