PartialFormer: Modeling Part Instead of Whole for Machine Translation

Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Huiwen Bao, Jiale Wang, Weiqiao Shan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu


Abstract
The design choices in Transformer feed-forward neural networks have resulted in significant computational and parameter overhead. In this work, we emphasize the importance of hidden dimensions in designing lightweight FFNs, a factor often overlooked in previous architectures. Guided by this principle, we introduce PartialFormer, a parameter-efficient Transformer architecture utilizing multiple smaller FFNs to reduce parameters and computation while maintaining essential hidden dimensions. These smaller FFNs are integrated into a multi-head attention mechanism for effective collaboration. We also propose a tailored head scaling strategy to enhance PartialFormer’s capabilities. Furthermore, we present a residual-like attention calculation to improve depth scaling within PartialFormer. Extensive experiments on 9 translation tasks and 1 abstractive summarization task validate the effectiveness of our PartialFormer approach on machine translation and summarization tasks. Our code would be available at: https://github.com/zhengkid/PartialFormer.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.434
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7280–7294
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.434
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.434
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Huiwen Bao, Jiale Wang, Weiqiao Shan, Tong Xiao, and JingBo Zhu. 2024. PartialFormer: Modeling Part Instead of Whole for Machine Translation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7280–7294, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PartialFormer: Modeling Part Instead of Whole for Machine Translation (Zheng et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.434.pdf