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arXiv · 2109.03939

What's Hidden in a One-layer Randomly Weighted Transformer?

Sheng Shen·Zhewei Yao·Douwe Kiela·Kurt Keutzer·Michael W. Mahoney
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Abstract

We demonstrate that, hidden within one-layer randomly weighted neural networks, there exist subnetworks that can achieve impressive performance, without ever modifying the weight initializations, on machine translation tasks. To find subnetworks for one-layer randomly weighted neural networks, we apply different binary masks to the same weight matrix to generate different layers. Hidden within a one-layer randomly weighted Transformer, we find that subnetworks that can achieve 29.45/17.29 BLEU on IWSLT14/WMT14. Using a fixed pre-trained embedding layer, the previously found subnetworks are smaller than, but can match 98%/92% (34.14/25.24 BLEU) of the performance of, a trained Transformer small/base on IWSLT14/WMT14. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of larger and deeper transformers in this setting, as well as the impact of different initialization methods. We released the source code at https://github.com/sIncerass/one_layer_lottery_ticket.

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Sheng Shen, Zhewei Yao, Douwe Kiela, Kurt Keutzer, Michael W. Mahoney. 2021-09-08. What's Hidden in a One-layer Randomly Weighted Transformer?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03939

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