Cited by 69Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesSpeech Recognition and Synthesis

Character-Level Language Modeling with Deeper Self-Attention

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Al-Rfou, Rami, Choe, Dokook, Constant, Noah, Guo, Mandy, Jones, Llion·2019·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

LSTMs and other RNN variants have shown strong performance on character-level language modeling. These models are typically trained using truncated backpropagation through time, and it is common to assume that their success stems from their ability to remember long-term contexts. In this paper, we show that a deep (64-layer) transformer model (Vaswani et al. 2017) with fixed context outperforms RNN variants by a large margin, achieving state of the art on two popular benchmarks: 1.13 bits per character on text8 and 1.06 on enwik8. To get good results at this depth, we show that it is important to add auxiliary losses, both at intermediate network layers and intermediate sequence positions.

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  • Auxiliary losses in decoder help the model output the correct number of objects of each class.

    “We found helpful to use auxiliary losses [1] in decoder during training, especially to help the model output the correct number of objects of each class.”

    From End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers (2020) · cites this paper as [1]

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  1. Chelba, C.; Mikolov, T.; Schuster, M.; Ge, Q.; Brants, T.; Koehn, P.; and Robinson, T. 2013. One billion word benchmark for measuring progress in statistical language modeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.3005 . · arXiv
  2. Lei Ba, J.; Kiros, J. R.; and Hinton, G. E. 2016. Layer Normalization. ArXiv e-prints .
  3. Mikolov, T.; Sutskever, I.; Deoras, A.; Le, H.-S.; Kombrink, S.; and Cernocky, J. 2012. Subword language modeling with neural networks. preprint (http://www. fit. vutbr. cz/imikolov/rnnlm/char. pdf) 8.
  4. Shazeer, N.; Mirhoseini, A.; Maziarz, K.; Davis, A.; Le, Q. V.; Hinton, G. E.; and Dean, J. 2017. Outrageously large neural networks: The sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts layer. CoRR abs/1701.06538. · arXiv
  5. Sukhbaatar, S.; Weston, J.; Fergus, R.; et al. 2015. End-to-end memory networks. In Advances in neural information processing systems , 2440-2448.

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Authors
Al-Rfou, R., Choe, D., Constant, N., Guo, M., & Jones, L.
Affiliations
Google (United States) (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2019-07-17
Volume
33
Issue
01
Pages
3159-3166
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W2886490473
Cited by
56
References
51
Citations by year
2025: 3 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 3
FWCI
3.54
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Keywords
self-attention, transformer models, auxiliary loss, LSTM comparison

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