| Challenge: | Deep attention models have advanced the modelling of sequential data across many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer augmented with a long-range memory to model sequential data across many domains. |
| Outcome: | The Transformer-XL has a long-range memory at every layer of the network, rendering its state thousands of times larger than RNN predecessors. |
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The NLP Task Effectiveness of Long-Range Transformers (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on long-range attention models have not been sufficient to develop efficient Transformers and their practical application on complex NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark 7 Transformer variants on 5 difficult NLP tasks and 7 datasets to examine their capacity for long-range attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models have advantages on content selection and query-guided decoding, but they come with previously unrecognized drawbacks such as insufficient attention to distant tokens and accumulated approximation error. |
Efficient Long-Range Transformers: You Need to Attend More, but Not Necessarily at Every Layer (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer variant with mixed attention spans that leverages the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve competitive performance to models with full attention while reducing computational cost (75%) |
Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models have advanced the previous state-of-the-art by learning mappings between sequences via neural networks and attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use layer normalization to pass the combination of previous layers to the next layer to improve the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline model on English-German and Chinese-English tasks by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. |
TRAMS: Training-free Memory Selection for Long-range Language Modeling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods like Transformer-XL are plagued by ineffective memory selections due to the high number of tokens involved in attention calculation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play strategy that selects tokens participating in attention calculation based on one simple metric and ignores the other ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy keeps tokens with high attention scores and ignores the other ones on word-level and character-level benchmarks without additional training or adding additional parameters. |
Do Long-Range Language Models Actually Use Long-Range Context? (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models are generally trained on short, truncated input sequences, which limits their ability to use discourse-level information present in long-range context to improve their predictions. |
| Approach: | They analyze two long-range Transformer language models that accept 8K token inputs . they find that providing long-term context only improves their predictions on a small set of tokens - not sentence-level ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on PG-19 with only 2K tokens and does not help at all for sentence-level prediction tasks. |
LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that increasing the input length or increasing model size can improve the performance of Transformer-based neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates attention ideas from long-input transformers and adopts pre-training strategies from summarization pre-train into the scalable T5 architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the original T5 models on several summarization and question answering tasks and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Adaptive Attention Span in Transformers (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | We extend the maximum context size of a neural network called Transformer to 8k characters. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-attention mechanism that can learn its optimal attention span . this allows for models with longer context and the capability to catch longer dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on text8 and enwiki8 using 8k characters with no loss of performance, and maintains control over memory footprint and computational time. |
Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models beyond a Fixed-Length Context (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Term memory networks (RNNs) are difficult to optimize due to gradient vanishing and explosion. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture Transformer-XL that enables learning dependency beyond a fixed length without disrupting temporal coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art performance on short and long sequences and generates coherent, novel text articles with thousands of tokens. |
Can Transformers Process Recursive Nested Constructions, Like Humans? (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | A recent study evaluated recursive processing in recurrent neural language models (RNN-LMs) and showed that such models perform below chance level on embedded dependencies within nested constructions. |
| Approach: | They evaluated recursive processing in recurrent neural language models and found that Transformers perform below chance level on embedded dependencies within nested constructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform below chance level on embedded dependencies within nested constructions, compared to humans. |
Revisiting Transformer-based Models for Long Document Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent literature in text classification is biased towards short text sequences . multi-page multi-paragraph documents cannot be efficiently encoded by vanilla transformers based on short text. |
| Approach: | They compare different Transformer-based Long Document Classification approaches to mitigate the computational overhead of vanilla transformers to encode much longer text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can process longer text and provide practical advice for long document classification tasks. |