Depth-adaptive transformer

M Elbayad, J Gu, E Grave, M Auli - arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.10073, 2019 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.10073, 2019arxiv.org
State of the art sequence-to-sequence models for large scale tasks perform a fixed number
of computations for each input sequence regardless of whether it is easy or hard to process.
In this paper, we train Transformer models which can make output predictions at different
stages of the network and we investigate different ways to predict how much computation is
required for a particular sequence. Unlike dynamic computation in Universal Transformers,
which applies the same set of layers iteratively, we apply different layers at every step to …
State of the art sequence-to-sequence models for large scale tasks perform a fixed number of computations for each input sequence regardless of whether it is easy or hard to process. In this paper, we train Transformer models which can make output predictions at different stages of the network and we investigate different ways to predict how much computation is required for a particular sequence. Unlike dynamic computation in Universal Transformers, which applies the same set of layers iteratively, we apply different layers at every step to adjust both the amount of computation as well as the model capacity. On IWSLT German-English translation our approach matches the accuracy of a well tuned baseline Transformer while using less than a quarter of the decoder layers.
arxiv.org