Cited by 1,422Topic ModelingAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

A survey of transformers

Open access
Lin, Tianyang, Wang, Yuxin, Liu, Xiangyang, Qiu, Xipeng·2022·AI Open

Abstract

Transformers have achieved great success in many artificial intelligence fields, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Therefore, it is natural to attract lots of interest from academic and industry researchers. Up to the present, a great variety of Transformer variants (a.k.a. X-formers) have been proposed, however, a systematic and comprehensive literature review on these Transformer variants is still missing. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various X-formers. We first briefly introduce the vanilla Transformer and then propose a new taxonomy of X-formers. Next, we introduce the various X-formers from three perspectives: architectural modification, pre-training, and applications. Finally, we outline some potential directions for future research.

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Crossref · 10.1016/j.aiopen.2022.10.001

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  • Other deep neural networks such as Graph Neural Networks and Transformers have become prevalent in anomaly detection.

    “In addition to the above-mentioned DNNs, namely, AEs, RNNs, CNNs, GANs, Deep OCSVM, and DevNet, other DNNs such as Graph Neural Networks [39] and Transformers [119] have become prevalent in anomaly detection.”

    From A Survey on Explainable Anomaly Detection (2024) · cites this paper as [119]

    The Introduction and §8 (Applications of Transformer; page not available) describe Transformers as widely adopted deep-learning models, supporting the identification of Transformers as a type of DNN. The passages found for “anomaly detection” do not address that application, so this source does not support the claim that Transformers have become prevalent in anomaly detection. The separate citation [39], not this source, is attached to Graph Neural Networks. (LLM, conf=0.82)

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2 of the 183 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 10

  1. Arnab, Anurag, Dehghani, Mostafa, Heigold, Georg, Sun, Chen, Lučić, Mario, Schmid, Cordelia, 2021. Vivit: A video vision transformer. arXiv:2103.15691. · arXiv
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  4. Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna, Vaswani, Ashish, Uszkoreit, Jakob, Simon, Ian, Hawthorne, Curtis, Shazeer, Noam, Dai, Andrew M., Hoffman, Matthew D., Dinculescu, Monica, Eck, Douglas, 2019. Music transformer. In: Proceedings of ICLR. URL https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJe4ShAcF7.
  5. Liu, Hanxiao, Simonyan, Karen, Yang, Yiming, 2019b. DARTS: Differentiable archi- tecture search. In: Proceedings of ICLR. URL https://openreview.net/forum?id= S1eYHoC5FX.
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  8. Vaswani, Ashish, Bengio, Samy, Brevdo, Eugene, Chollet, Francois, Gomez, Aidan, Gouws, Stephan, Jones, Llion, Kaiser, Łukasz, Kalchbrenner, Nal, Parmar, Niki, Sepassi, Ryan, Shazeer, Noam, Uszkoreit, Jakob, 2018. Tensor2Tensor for neural machine translation. In: Proceedings of AMTA. pp. 193-199, URL https://www. aclweb.org/anthology/W18-1819.
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  10. Yang, An, Lin, Junyang, Men, Rui, Zhou, Chang, Jiang, Le, Jia, Xianyan, Wang, Ang, Zhang, Jie, Wang, Jiamang, Li, Yong, Zhang, Di, Lin, Wei, Qu, Lin, Zhou, Jingren, Yang, Hongxia, 2021. Exploring sparse expert models and beyond. arXiv:2105. 15082, [cs.LG].

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Authors
Lin, T., Wang, Y., Liu, X., & Qiu, X.
Affiliations
Fudan University (CN)
Corresponding author
Qiu, Xipeng
Venue
AI Open
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2022
Volume
3
Pages
111-132
ISSN
2666-6510 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3171649327
Cited by
1,422
References
183
Citations by year
2026: 217 · 2025: 423 · 2024: 438 · 2023: 264 · 2022: 69 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 1
FWCI
98.23
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • AI Open (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
National Natural Science Foundation of China (62022027)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
transformer models, architectural alterations, pre-training, natural language processing, computer vision, audio signal processing

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