{"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/the-conformer-encoder-may-reverse-the-time","title":"The Conformer Encoder May Reverse the Time Dimension","arxiv_id":"2410.00680","date":"2024-10-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Robin Schmitt","Albert Zeyer","Mohammad Zeineldeen","Ralf Schlüter","Hermann Ney"],"abstract":"We sometimes observe monotonically decreasing cross-attention weights in our Conformer-based global attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models, Further investigation shows that the Conformer encoder reverses the sequence in the time dimension. We analyze the initial behavior of the decoder cross-attention mechanism and find that it encourages the Conformer encoder self-attention to build a connection between the initial frames and all other informative frames. Furthermore, we show that, at some point in training, the self-attention module of the Conformer starts dominating the output over the preceding feed-forward module, which then only allows the reversed information to pass through. We propose methods and ideas of how this flipping can be avoided and investigate a novel method to obtain label-frame-position alignments by using the gradients of the label log probabilities w.r.t. the encoder input frames.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00680v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00680v2.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":"the-conformer-encoder-may-reverse-the-time","repo_url":"https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn-experiments","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}