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A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer

Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Barun Patra, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Alon Benhaim, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song, Furu Wei


Abstract
Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define attention resolution as an indicator of extrapolation. Then we propose two designs to improve the above metric of Transformers. Specifically, we introduce a relative position embedding to explicitly maximize attention resolution. Moreover, we use blockwise causal attention during inference for better resolution. We evaluate different Transformer variants with language modeling. Experimental results show that our model achieves strong performance in both interpolation and extrapolation settings. The code will be available at https://aka.ms/LeX-Transformer.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.816
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14590–14604
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.816
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.816
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Barun Patra, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Alon Benhaim, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song, and Furu Wei. 2023. A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14590–14604, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer (Sun et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.816.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.816.mp4