Papers › Subformer: A Parameter Reduced Transformer
Subformer: A Parameter Reduced Transformer
Machel Reid, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Yutaka Matsuo
The advent of the Transformer can arguably be described as a driving force behind many of the recent advances in natural language processing. However, despite their sizeable performance improvements, as recently shown, the model is severely over-parameterized, being parameter inefficient and computationally expensive to train. Inspired by the success of parameter-sharing in pre-trained deep contextualized word representation encoders, we explore parameter-sharing methods in Transformers, with a specific focus on encoder-decoder models for sequence-to-sequence tasks such as Machine Translation. We perform an analysis of different parameter sharing/reduction methods and develop the Subformer, a parameter efficient Transformer-based model which combines the newly proposed Sandwich-style parameter sharing technique and self-attentive embedding factorization (SAFE). Experiments on machine translation, abstractive summarization, and language modeling show that the Subformer can outperform the Transformer even when using significantly fewer parameters. On the WMT'14 English-German test set, we show we can perform equally well, and even sometimes outperform (+0.1 BLEU score) the Transformer-base model while using 40% less parameters. We also perform equally well as Transformer-big with 40% less parameters and outperform the model by 0.7 BLEU with 12M less parameters. We also outperform the standard Transformer-XL model, achieving a significant 3.6 lower perplexity with 37% fewer parameters.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abstractive Text Summarization | CNN / Daily Mail | Subformer-base | ROUGE-1 | 40.9 | #37 of 53 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Abstractive Text Summarization | CNN / Daily Mail | Subformer-base | ROUGE-2 | 18.3 | #37 of 53 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Abstractive Text Summarization | CNN / Daily Mail | Subformer-base | ROUGE-L | 37.7 | #37 of 53 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-103 | Subformer | Number of params | 96M | #42 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-103 | Subformer | Test perplexity | 20.39 | #42 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Machine Translation | WMT2014 English-German | Subformer-xlarge | BLEU score | 29.3 | #26 of 91 | 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
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