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Query-Key Normalization for Transformers

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arxiv 2010.04245 v1 pith:XONKRPS7 submitted 2020-10-08 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.LG
keywords normalizationdimensionlow-resourcetranslationadaptingalongapplyarbitrary
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

Low-resource language translation is a challenging but socially valuable NLP task. Building on recent work adapting the Transformer's normalization to this setting, we propose QKNorm, a normalization technique that modifies the attention mechanism to make the softmax function less prone to arbitrary saturation without sacrificing expressivity. Specifically, we apply $\ell_2$ normalization along the head dimension of each query and key matrix prior to multiplying them and then scale up by a learnable parameter instead of dividing by the square root of the embedding dimension. We show improvements averaging 0.928 BLEU over state-of-the-art bilingual benchmarks for 5 low-resource translation pairs from the TED Talks corpus and IWSLT'15.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. One QK Channel, Many Sources: Guarding Low-Precision Attention Collapse

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    Different low-precision errors converge on the same query-key spectral runaway, entry is gated by temporal sign-coherence, and a dormant query-key normalization guard contains it.

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