Multi-branch Attentive Transformer

18 Jun 2020  ·  Yang Fan, Shufang Xie, Yingce Xia, Lijun Wu, Tao Qin, Xiang-Yang Li, Tie-Yan Liu ·

While the multi-branch architecture is one of the key ingredients to the success of computer vision tasks, it has not been well investigated in natural language processing, especially sequence learning tasks. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective variant of Transformer called multi-branch attentive Transformer (briefly, MAT), where the attention layer is the average of multiple branches and each branch is an independent multi-head attention layer. We leverage two training techniques to regularize the training: drop-branch, which randomly drops individual branches during training, and proximal initialization, which uses a pre-trained Transformer model to initialize multiple branches. Experiments on machine translation, code generation and natural language understanding demonstrate that such a simple variant of Transformer brings significant improvements. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/HA-Transformer}.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Machine Translation IWSLT2014 German-English MAT BLEU score 36.22 # 16
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-German MAT SacreBLEU 29.9 # 4

Methods