Papers › Training Tips for the Transformer Model

Training Tips for the Transformer Model

1 Apr 2018arXiv:1804.00247archive 2025-07-28

Martin Popel, Ondřej Bojar

This article describes our experiments in neural machine translation using the recent Tensor2Tensor framework and the Transformer sequence-to-sequence model (Vaswani et al., 2017). We examine some of the critical parameters that affect the final translation quality, memory usage, training stability and training time, concluding each experiment with a set of recommendations for fellow researchers. In addition to confirming the general mantra "more data and larger models", we address scaling to multiple GPUs and provide practical tips for improved training regarding batch size, learning rate, warmup steps, maximum sentence length and checkpoint averaging. We hope that our observations will allow others to get better results given their particular hardware and data constraints.

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tensorflow/tensor2tensor officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
caoyujiALgLM/NLP mentioned on GitHubtfGPL-3.0 report
gavincaoyuji/NLP mentioned on GitHubtfGPL-3.0 report

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Machine TranslationSentenceTranslationmodel

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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