Hard-Coded Gaussian Attention for Neural Machine Translation

Weiqiu You, Simeng Sun, Mohit Iyyer


Abstract
Recent work has questioned the importance of the Transformer’s multi-headed attention for achieving high translation quality. We push further in this direction by developing a “hard-coded” attention variant without any learned parameters. Surprisingly, replacing all learned self-attention heads in the encoder and decoder with fixed, input-agnostic Gaussian distributions minimally impacts BLEU scores across four different language pairs. However, additionally, hard-coding cross attention (which connects the decoder to the encoder) significantly lowers BLEU, suggesting that it is more important than self-attention. Much of this BLEU drop can be recovered by adding just a single learned cross attention head to an otherwise hard-coded Transformer. Taken as a whole, our results offer insight into which components of the Transformer are actually important, which we hope will guide future work into the development of simpler and more efficient attention-based models.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.687
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7689–7700
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.687
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.687
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weiqiu You, Simeng Sun, and Mohit Iyyer. 2020. Hard-Coded Gaussian Attention for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7689–7700, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hard-Coded Gaussian Attention for Neural Machine Translation (You et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.687.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929389
Code
 fallcat/stupidNMT