In plain words: Transformers are powerful but slow and memory-hungry, so many "X-former" variants have been proposed to speed them up. It sorts a wide selection of these designs into clear groups by how they cut cost, giving researchers a map of the field.
Abstract
Transformer model architectures have garnered immense interest lately due to their effectiveness across a range of domains like language, vision and reinforcement learning. In the field of natural language processing for example, Transformers have become an indispensable staple in the modern deep learning stack. Recently, a dizzying number of "X-former" models have been proposed - Reformer, Linformer, Performer, Longformer, to name a few - which improve upon the original Transformer architecture, many of which make improvements around computational and memory efficiency. With the aim of helping the avid researcher navigate this flurry, this paper characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent efficiency-flavored "X-former" models, providing an organized and comprehensive overview of existing work and models across multiple domains.
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Dara Bahri, Donald Metzler
arXiv:2009.06732 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.IR · submitted Sep 14, 2020 · updated Mar 14, 2022
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