Cited by 51Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingSpeech Recognition and Synthesis

Query-Key Normalization for Transformers

Open access
Henry, Alex, Dachapally, Prudhvi Raj, Pawar, Shubham Shantaram, Chen, Yuxuan·2020·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Abstract

Low-resource language translation is a challenging but socially valuable NLP task.Building on recent work adapting the Transformer's normalization to this setting, we propose QKNORM, a normalization technique that modifies the attention mechanism to make the softmax function less prone to arbitrary saturation without sacrificing expressivity.Specifically, we apply ℓ 2 normalization along the head dimension of each query and key matrix prior to multiplying them and then scale up by a learnable parameter instead of dividing by the square root of the embedding dimension.We show improvements averaging 0.928 BLEU over state-of-the-art bilingual benchmarks for 5 low-resource translation pairs from the TED Talks corpus and IWSLT'15. 1

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.379

Cites

34 of 34 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Employing bfloat16 and QK norm for training the dynamics model stabilizes training at large scale.

    “we employ bfloat16 and QK norm for training our dynamics model, which has been shown to stabilize training at large scale (Dehghani et al., 2023; Henry et al., 2020).”

    From Genie: Generative Interactive Environments (2024) · cites this paper as Henry et al., 2020

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

4 of the 38 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Henry, A., Dachapally, P. R., Pawar, S. S., & Chen, Y.
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Published
2020
Pages
4246-4253
OpenAlex
W3099096615
Cited by
45
References
38
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 1
FWCI
0.86
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Keywords
low-resource translation, attention mechanism

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review