Improving Deep Transformer with Depth-Scaled Initialization and Merged Attention

Biao Zhang, Ivan Titov, Rico Sennrich


Abstract
The general trend in NLP is towards increasing model capacity and performance via deeper neural networks. However, simply stacking more layers of the popular Transformer architecture for machine translation results in poor convergence and high computational overhead. Our empirical analysis suggests that convergence is poor due to gradient vanishing caused by the interaction between residual connection and layer normalization. We propose depth-scaled initialization (DS-Init), which decreases parameter variance at the initialization stage, and reduces output variance of residual connections so as to ease gradient back-propagation through normalization layers. To address computational cost, we propose a merged attention sublayer (MAtt) which combines a simplified average-based self-attention sublayer and the encoder-decoder attention sublayer on the decoder side. Results on WMT and IWSLT translation tasks with five translation directions show that deep Transformers with DS-Init and MAtt can substantially outperform their base counterpart in terms of BLEU (+1.1 BLEU on average for 12-layer models), while matching the decoding speed of the baseline model thanks to the efficiency improvements of MAtt. Source code for reproduction will be released soon.
Anthology ID:
D19-1083
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
898–909
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1083
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1083
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Biao Zhang, Ivan Titov, and Rico Sennrich. 2019. Improving Deep Transformer with Depth-Scaled Initialization and Merged Attention. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 898–909, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Deep Transformer with Depth-Scaled Initialization and Merged Attention (Zhang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1083.pdf
Code
 bzhangGo/zero
Data
WMT 2014