Sparsifying Transformer Models with Trainable Representation Pooling

Michał Pietruszka; Łukasz Borchmann; Łukasz Garncarek

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arXiv · 2009.05169

Sparsifying Transformer Models with Trainable Representation Pooling

Michał Pietruszka·Łukasz Borchmann·Łukasz Garncarek

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Abstract

We propose a novel method to sparsify attention in the Transformer model by learning to select the most-informative token representations during the training process, thus focusing on the task-specific parts of an input. A reduction of quadratic time and memory complexity to sublinear was achieved due to a robust trainable top-$k$ operator. Our experiments on a challenging long document summarization task show that even our simple baseline performs comparably to the current SOTA, and with trainable pooling, we can retain its top quality, while being $1.8\times$ faster during training, $4.5\times$ faster during inference, and up to $13\times$ more computationally efficient in the decoder.

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Michał Pietruszka, Łukasz Borchmann, Łukasz Garncarek. 2020-09-10. Sparsifying Transformer Models with Trainable Representation Pooling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.05169

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