A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer
Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Barun Patra, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Alon Benhaim, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sun-etal-2023-length,
title = "A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer",
author = "Sun, Yutao and
Dong, Li and
Patra, Barun and
Ma, Shuming and
Huang, Shaohan and
Benhaim, Alon and
Chaudhary, Vishrav and
Song, Xia and
Wei, Furu",
editor = "Rogers, Anna and
Boyd-Graber, Jordan and
Okazaki, Naoaki",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.816/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.816",
pages = "14590--14604"
}