Papers › Transformer on a Diet

Transformer on a Diet

14 Feb 2020arXiv:2002.06170archive 2025-07-28

Chenguang Wang, Zihao Ye, Aston Zhang, Zheng Zhang, Alexander J. Smola

Transformer has been widely used thanks to its ability to capture sequence information in an efficient way. However, recent developments, such as BERT and GPT-2, deliver only heavy architectures with a focus on effectiveness. In this paper, we explore three carefully-designed light Transformer architectures to figure out whether the Transformer with less computations could produce competitive results. Experimental results on language model benchmark datasets hint that such trade-off is promising, and the light Transformer reduces 70% parameters at best, while obtains competitive perplexity compared to standard Transformer. The source code is publicly available.

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Language ModelingLanguage Modelling

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPT-2Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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