Perceiving Longer Sequences With Bi-Directional Cross-Attention Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hiller, Markus, Ehinger, Krista A., Drummond, Tom
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Hiller, Markus
Ehinger, Krista A.
Drummond, Tom
author_facet Hiller, Markus
Ehinger, Krista A.
Drummond, Tom
contents We present a novel bi-directional Transformer architecture (BiXT) which scales linearly with input size in terms of computational cost and memory consumption, but does not suffer the drop in performance or limitation to only one input modality seen with other efficient Transformer-based approaches. BiXT is inspired by the Perceiver architectures but replaces iterative attention with an efficient bi-directional cross-attention module in which input tokens and latent variables attend to each other simultaneously, leveraging a naturally emerging attention-symmetry between the two. This approach unlocks a key bottleneck experienced by Perceiver-like architectures and enables the processing and interpretation of both semantics ('what') and location ('where') to develop alongside each other over multiple layers -- allowing its direct application to dense and instance-based tasks alike. By combining efficiency with the generality and performance of a full Transformer architecture, BiXT can process longer sequences like point clouds, text or images at higher feature resolutions and achieves competitive performance across a range of tasks like point cloud part segmentation, semantic image segmentation, image classification, hierarchical sequence modeling and document retrieval. Our experiments demonstrate that BiXT models outperform larger competitors by leveraging longer sequences more efficiently on vision tasks like classification and segmentation, and perform on par with full Transformer variants on sequence modeling and document retrieval -- but require $28\%$ fewer FLOPs and are up to $8.4\times$ faster.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12138
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Perceiving Longer Sequences With Bi-Directional Cross-Attention Transformers
Hiller, Markus
Ehinger, Krista A.
Drummond, Tom
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present a novel bi-directional Transformer architecture (BiXT) which scales linearly with input size in terms of computational cost and memory consumption, but does not suffer the drop in performance or limitation to only one input modality seen with other efficient Transformer-based approaches. BiXT is inspired by the Perceiver architectures but replaces iterative attention with an efficient bi-directional cross-attention module in which input tokens and latent variables attend to each other simultaneously, leveraging a naturally emerging attention-symmetry between the two. This approach unlocks a key bottleneck experienced by Perceiver-like architectures and enables the processing and interpretation of both semantics ('what') and location ('where') to develop alongside each other over multiple layers -- allowing its direct application to dense and instance-based tasks alike. By combining efficiency with the generality and performance of a full Transformer architecture, BiXT can process longer sequences like point clouds, text or images at higher feature resolutions and achieves competitive performance across a range of tasks like point cloud part segmentation, semantic image segmentation, image classification, hierarchical sequence modeling and document retrieval. Our experiments demonstrate that BiXT models outperform larger competitors by leveraging longer sequences more efficiently on vision tasks like classification and segmentation, and perform on par with full Transformer variants on sequence modeling and document retrieval -- but require $28\%$ fewer FLOPs and are up to $8.4\times$ faster.
title Perceiving Longer Sequences With Bi-Directional Cross-Attention Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12138