Generalized Probabilistic Attention Mechanism in Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Heo, DongNyeong, Choi, Heeyoul
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Heo, DongNyeong
Choi, Heeyoul
author_facet Heo, DongNyeong
Choi, Heeyoul
contents The Transformer architecture has become widely adopted due to its demonstrated success, attributed to the attention mechanism at its core. Despite these successes, the attention mechanism of Transformers is associated with two well-known issues: rank-collapse and gradient vanishing. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis that it is inherently difficult to address both issues simultaneously in the conventional attention mechanism. To handle these issues, we introduce a novel class of attention mechanism, referred to as generalized probabilistic attention mechanism (GPAM), and its dual-attention implementation within the Transformer architecture. Unlike conventional attention mechanisms, GPAM allows for negative attention scores while preserving a fixed total sum. We provide theoretical evidence that the proposed dual-attention GPAM (daGPAM) effectively mitigates both the rank-collapse and gradient vanishing issues which are difficult to resolve simultaneously with the conventional attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we empirically validate this theoretical evidence, demonstrating the superiority of daGPAM compared to other alternative attention mechanisms that were proposed to address the same issues. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical benefits of GPAM in natural language processing tasks, such as language modeling and neural machine translation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15578
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalized Probabilistic Attention Mechanism in Transformers
Heo, DongNyeong
Choi, Heeyoul
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
The Transformer architecture has become widely adopted due to its demonstrated success, attributed to the attention mechanism at its core. Despite these successes, the attention mechanism of Transformers is associated with two well-known issues: rank-collapse and gradient vanishing. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis that it is inherently difficult to address both issues simultaneously in the conventional attention mechanism. To handle these issues, we introduce a novel class of attention mechanism, referred to as generalized probabilistic attention mechanism (GPAM), and its dual-attention implementation within the Transformer architecture. Unlike conventional attention mechanisms, GPAM allows for negative attention scores while preserving a fixed total sum. We provide theoretical evidence that the proposed dual-attention GPAM (daGPAM) effectively mitigates both the rank-collapse and gradient vanishing issues which are difficult to resolve simultaneously with the conventional attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we empirically validate this theoretical evidence, demonstrating the superiority of daGPAM compared to other alternative attention mechanisms that were proposed to address the same issues. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical benefits of GPAM in natural language processing tasks, such as language modeling and neural machine translation.
title Generalized Probabilistic Attention Mechanism in Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15578