Skip-Layer Attention: Bridging Abstract and Detailed Dependencies in Transformers

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11274v1
• Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 07:24:38 GMT
• Title: Skip-Layer Attention: Bridging Abstract and Detailed Dependencies in Transformers
• Authors: Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Qinglin Zhang, Siqi Zheng, Shiliang Zhang, Chong Deng, Hai Yu, Jiaqing Liu, Yukun Ma, Chong Zhang,
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces Skip-Layer Attention (SLA) to enhance Transformer models. SLA improves the model's ability to capture dependencies between high-level abstract features and low-level details. Our implementation extends the Transformer's functionality by enabling queries in a given layer to interact with keys and values from both the current layer and one preceding layer.
• Score: 56.264673865476986
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows, refining the Transformer's architecture becomes critical. This paper introduces Skip-Layer Attention (SLA) to enhance Transformer models by enabling direct attention between non-adjacent layers. This method improves the model's ability to capture dependencies between high-level abstract features and low-level details. By facilitating direct attention between these diverse feature levels, our approach overcomes the limitations of current Transformers, which often rely on suboptimal intra-layer attention. Our implementation extends the Transformer's functionality by enabling queries in a given layer to interact with keys and values from both the current layer and one preceding layer, thus enhancing the diversity of multi-head attention without additional computational burden. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our enhanced Transformer model achieves superior performance in language modeling tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our skip-layer attention mechanism.

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