Papers › You May Not Need Attention

You May Not Need Attention

31 Oct 2018arXiv:1810.13409archive 2025-07-28

Ofir Press, Noah A. Smith

In NMT, how far can we get without attention and without separate encoding and decoding? To answer that question, we introduce a recurrent neural translation model that does not use attention and does not have a separate encoder and decoder. Our eager translation model is low-latency, writing target tokens as soon as it reads the first source token, and uses constant memory during decoding. It performs on par with the standard attention-based model of Bahdanau et al. (2014), and better on long sentences.

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