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Revealing the Dark Secrets of Bert (arxiv.org)
1 point by sel1 on Aug 27, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The study checks what each attention head in BERT — the part that picks which words to focus on — looks at, using hand-picked patterns across several language tasks. Only a few patterns repeat across heads, and switching some off beats the usual fine-tuned BERT.

Abstract · Revealing the Dark Secrets of BERT

BERT-based architectures currently give state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, but little is known about the exact mechanisms that contribute to its success. In the current work, we focus on the interpretation of self-attention, which is one of the fundamental underlying components of BERT. Using a subset of GLUE tasks and a set of handcrafted features-of-interest, we propose the methodology and carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the information encoded by the individual BERT's heads. Our findings suggest that there is a limited set of attention patterns that are repeated across different heads, indicating the overall model overparametrization. While different heads consistently use the same attention patterns, they have varying impact on performance across different tasks. We show that manually disabling attention in certain heads leads to a performance improvement over the regular fine-tuned BERT models.

Olga Kovaleva, Alexey Romanov, Anna Rogers, Anna Rumshisky
arXiv:1908.08593 · cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Aug 21, 2019 · updated Sep 11, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to EMNLP 2019

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