{"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/scalable-attentive-sentence-pair-modeling-via","title":"Scalable Attentive Sentence-Pair Modeling via Distilled Sentence Embedding","arxiv_id":"1908.05161","date":"2019-08-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Oren Barkan","Noam Razin","Itzik Malkiel","Ori Katz","Avi Caciularu","Noam Koenigstein"],"abstract":"Recent state-of-the-art natural language understanding models, such as BERT and XLNet, score a pair of sentences (A and B) using multiple cross-attention operations - a process in which each word in sentence A attends to all words in sentence B and vice versa. As a result, computing the similarity between a query sentence and a set of candidate sentences, requires the propagation of all query-candidate sentence-pairs throughout a stack of cross-attention layers. This exhaustive process becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of candidate sentences is large. In contrast, sentence embedding techniques learn a sentence-to-vector mapping and compute the similarity between the sentence vectors via simple elementary operations. In this paper, we introduce Distilled Sentence Embedding (DSE) - a model that is based on knowledge distillation from cross-attentive models, focusing on sentence-pair tasks. The outline of DSE is as follows: Given a cross-attentive teacher model (e.g. a fine-tuned BERT), we train a sentence embedding based student model to reconstruct the sentence-pair scores obtained by the teacher model. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of DSE on five GLUE sentence-pair tasks. DSE significantly outperforms several ELMO variants and other sentence embedding methods, while accelerating computation of the query-candidate sentence-pairs similarities by several orders of magnitude, with an average relative degradation of 4.6% compared to BERT. Furthermore, we show that DSE produces sentence embeddings that reach state-of-the-art performance on universal sentence representation benchmarks. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/Distilled-Sentence-Embedding.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05161v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05161v3.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":"scalable-attentive-sentence-pair-modeling-via","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/Distilled-Sentence-Embedding","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"},{"task_slug":"semantic-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Similarity"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"},{"task_slug":"sentence-embedding","task_name":"Sentence Embedding"},{"task_slug":"sentence-embeddings","task_name":"Sentence Embeddings"},{"task_slug":"sentence-pair-modeling","task_name":"Sentence Pair Modeling"},{"task_slug":"sentence-embedding-1","task_name":"Sentence-Embedding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"bilstm","method_name":"BiLSTM"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"elmo","method_name":"ELMo"},{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"method_slug":"lstm","method_name":"LSTM"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sentencepiece","method_name":"SentencePiece"},{"method_slug":"sigmoid-activation","method_name":"Sigmoid Activation"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"tanh-activation","method_name":"Tanh Activation"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"},{"method_slug":"xlnet","method_name":"XLNet"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1908.05161","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}