Paper Reading AI Learner

Simple Local Attentions Remain Competitive for Long-Context Tasks

2021-12-14 07:37:58
Wenhan Xiong, Barlas Oğuz, Anchit Gupta, Xilun Chen, Diana Liskovich, Omer Levy, Wen-tau Yih, Yashar Mehdad

Abstract

Many NLP tasks require processing long contexts beyond the length limit of pretrained models. In order to scale these models to longer text sequences, many efficient long-range attention variants have been proposed. Despite the abundance of research along this direction, it is still difficult to gauge the relative effectiveness of these models in practical use cases, e.g., if we apply these models following the pretrain-and-finetune paradigm. In this work, we aim to conduct a thorough analysis of these emerging models with large-scale and controlled experiments. For each attention variant, we pretrain large-size models using the same long-doc corpus and then finetune these models for real-world long-context tasks. Our findings reveal pitfalls of an existing widely-used long-range benchmark and show none of the tested efficient attentions can beat a simple local window attention under standard pretraining paradigms. Further analysis on local attention variants suggests that even the commonly used attention-window overlap is not necessary to achieve good downstream results -- using disjoint local attentions, we are able to build a simpler and more efficient long-doc QA model that matches the performance of Longformer~\citep{longformer} with half of its pretraining compute.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07210

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.07210.pdf


Tags
3D Action Action_Localization Action_Recognition Activity Adversarial Agent Attention Autonomous Bert Boundary_Detection Caption Chat Classification CNN Compressive_Sensing Contour Contrastive_Learning Deep_Learning Denoising Detection Dialog Diffusion Drone Dynamic_Memory_Network Edge_Detection Embedding Embodied Emotion Enhancement Face Face_Detection Face_Recognition Facial_Landmark Few-Shot Gait_Recognition GAN Gaze_Estimation Gesture Gradient_Descent Handwriting Human_Parsing Image_Caption Image_Classification Image_Compression Image_Enhancement Image_Generation Image_Matting Image_Retrieval Inference Inpainting Intelligent_Chip Knowledge Knowledge_Graph Language_Model Matching Medical Memory_Networks Multi_Modal Multi_Task NAS NMT Object_Detection Object_Tracking OCR Ontology Optical_Character Optical_Flow Optimization Person_Re-identification Point_Cloud Portrait_Generation Pose Pose_Estimation Prediction QA Quantitative Quantitative_Finance Quantization Re-identification Recognition Recommendation Reconstruction Regularization Reinforcement_Learning Relation Relation_Extraction Represenation Represenation_Learning Restoration Review RNN Salient Scene_Classification Scene_Generation Scene_Parsing Scene_Text Segmentation Self-Supervised Semantic_Instance_Segmentation Semantic_Segmentation Semi_Global Semi_Supervised Sence_graph Sentiment Sentiment_Classification Sketch SLAM Sparse Speech Speech_Recognition Style_Transfer Summarization Super_Resolution Surveillance Survey Text_Classification Text_Generation Tracking Transfer_Learning Transformer Unsupervised Video_Caption Video_Classification Video_Indexing Video_Prediction Video_Retrieval Visual_Relation VQA Weakly_Supervised Zero-Shot