Disentangling and Integrating Relational and Sensory Information in Transformer Architectures

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Altabaa, Awni, Lafferty, John
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Altabaa, Awni
Lafferty, John
author_facet Altabaa, Awni
Lafferty, John
contents Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent systems, enabling robust and data-efficient inductive generalization. Recent empirical evidence shows that many existing neural architectures, including Transformers, struggle with tasks requiring relational reasoning. In this work, we distinguish between two types of information: sensory information about the properties of individual objects, and relational information about the relationships between objects. While neural attention provides a powerful mechanism for controlling the flow of sensory information between objects, the Transformer lacks an explicit computational mechanism for routing and processing relational information. To address this limitation, we propose an architectural extension of the Transformer framework that we call the Dual Attention Transformer (DAT), featuring two distinct attention mechanisms: sensory attention for directing the flow of sensory information, and a novel relational attention mechanism for directing the flow of relational information. We empirically evaluate DAT on a diverse set of tasks ranging from synthetic relational benchmarks to complex real-world tasks such as language modeling and visual processing. Our results demonstrate that integrating explicit relational computational mechanisms into the Transformer architecture leads to significant performance gains in terms of data efficiency and parameter efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16727
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Disentangling and Integrating Relational and Sensory Information in Transformer Architectures
Altabaa, Awni
Lafferty, John
Machine Learning
Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent systems, enabling robust and data-efficient inductive generalization. Recent empirical evidence shows that many existing neural architectures, including Transformers, struggle with tasks requiring relational reasoning. In this work, we distinguish between two types of information: sensory information about the properties of individual objects, and relational information about the relationships between objects. While neural attention provides a powerful mechanism for controlling the flow of sensory information between objects, the Transformer lacks an explicit computational mechanism for routing and processing relational information. To address this limitation, we propose an architectural extension of the Transformer framework that we call the Dual Attention Transformer (DAT), featuring two distinct attention mechanisms: sensory attention for directing the flow of sensory information, and a novel relational attention mechanism for directing the flow of relational information. We empirically evaluate DAT on a diverse set of tasks ranging from synthetic relational benchmarks to complex real-world tasks such as language modeling and visual processing. Our results demonstrate that integrating explicit relational computational mechanisms into the Transformer architecture leads to significant performance gains in terms of data efficiency and parameter efficiency.
title Disentangling and Integrating Relational and Sensory Information in Transformer Architectures
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16727