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Attention Is All You Need (Neural Networks) (arxiv.org)
8 points by idibidiartists on Jun 13, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of reading words one at a time, the model lets every word look at every other word to decide what matters, with no step-by-step loop. It beat the best translation systems by over 2 points on the standard quality score while training faster.

Abstract · Attention Is All You Need

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.

Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
arXiv:1706.03762 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Jun 12, 2017 · updated Aug 2, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · 15 pages, 5 figures

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This is super interesting. I believe the general expectation was that convolutional neural networks would soon surpass recurrent neural networks in machine translation tasks, but this is an entirely novel approach.
This, and graph based neural nets are very different from CNN and LSTM. They learn to split a scene into objects and then learn how they interact. In this way a lot of variation in the input is factorized out and only relations between compatible types of objects are learned. It leads to stronger generalization.

If you think about it, when we are going to do full reasoning, how is the data to be represented? Embeddings and flat lists/matrices are not appropriate for the way objects interrelate. It has to be a kind of graph. Here they used multiple attentions instead, which kind-of work the same way as graphs, attention heads being similar to links between objects.

Once we have data represented as graphs we can also do simulation - we apply the rules of each object iteratively on the graph. The graph can be seen as an automata, where each object updates its state by integrating information from its neighbors. Automata are general Turing machines - they can represent and simulate any computation. With simulation we can do optimal solutions search. It opens a lot of doors for AI.

My money is on simulation and graphs for the next level of AI.

I do not think graphs is where we're heading. I think flat vectors are fine, and I would argue multi-head attention is not THAT different from gated RNNs like LSTM. The multiplication with weights, which are the outcome of a softmaxed dot-product, is similar to the input gate of LSTM.