Joshua Ainslie, Santiago Ontanon, Chris Alberti, Vaclav Cvicek, Zachary Fisher, Philip Pham, Anirudh Ravula, Sumit Sanghai, Qifan Wang, Li Yang
| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) have been challenging to scale attention to longer inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an extended Transformer construction architecture that scales attention to longer inputs by combining global-local attention with relative position encodings and a "Contrastive Predictive Coding" objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture scales attention to longer inputs and encodes structured inputs. |
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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. |
Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Liang Zhao, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance length extrapolation of large language models have been developed, but a systematic survey is lacking. |
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Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Thomas Wolf, Lysandre Debut, Victor Sanh, Julien Chaumond, Clement Delangue, Anthony Moi, Pierric Cistac, Tim Rault, Remi Louf, Morgan Funtowicz, Joe Davison, Sam Shleifer, Patrick von Platen, Clara Ma, Yacine Jernite, Julien Plu, Canwen Xu, Teven Le Scao, Sylvain Gugger, Mariama Drame, Quentin Lhoest, Alexander Rush
| Challenge: | Transformers is an open-source library that aims to open up advances in natural language processing to the wider machine learning community. |
| Approach: | they propose an open-source library that aims to open up advances in machine learning to the wider community. |
| Outcome: | Transformers is an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to the wider machine learning community. |
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%) |
Investigating Efficiently Extending Transformers for Long Input Summarization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained Transformer models have proven capable at tackling natural language tasks, but handling long sequence inputs still poses a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of the PEGASUS model with additional long input pretraining to handle inputs of up to 16K tokens. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Attention Alignment and Flexible Positional Embeddings Improve Transformer Length Extrapolation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for length extrapolation are tailored for natural language modeling, a task known to have strong recency bias. |
| Approach: | They propose two attention alignment strategies to improve T5's long-context utilization capability without fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the long-context utilization capability of T5 on language modeling, retrieval, multi-document question answering, and code completion tasks without any fine-tuning. |
Understanding and Overcoming the Challenges of Efficient Transformer Quantization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in transformer quantization have shown remarkable improvement in many Natural Language Processing tasks and beyond. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel quantization scheme for transformers that can be quantized to ultra-low bit-widths, leading to significant memory savings with a minimum accuracy loss. |
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LAIT: Efficient Multi-Segment Encoding in Transformers with Layer-Adjustable Interaction (2023.acl-long)
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Jeremiah Milbauer, Annie Louis, Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Alex Fabrikant, Donald Metzler, Tal Schuster
| Challenge: | In many NLP tasks, the input text can be seen as a sequence of related segments. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-adjustable interactions framework that contextualizes token representations by attending to all other tokens at each layer, leading to quadratic increase in compute effort with the input length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces 30-50% of attention FLOPs while maintaining high accuracy. |