LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences

Recent work has shown that either (1) increasing the input length or (2) increasing model size can improve the performance of Transformer-based neural models. In this paper, we present a new model, called LongT5, with which we explore the effects of scaling both the input length and model size at the same time. Specifically, we integrated attention ideas from long-input transformers (ETC), and adopted pre-training strategies from summarization pre-training (PEGASUS) into the scalable T5 architecture. The result is a new attention mechanism we call {\em Transient Global} (TGlobal), which mimics ETC's local/global attention mechanism, but without requiring additional side-inputs. We are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on several summarization tasks and outperform the original T5 models on question answering tasks.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Text Summarization Arxiv HEP-TH citation graph LongT5 ROUGE-1 48.35 # 9
ROUGE-2 21.92 # 2
ROUGE-L 44.27 # 5
Text Summarization BigPatent LongT5 ROUGE-1 76.87 # 1
ROUGE-2 66.06 # 1
ROUGE-L 70.76 # 1
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail LongT5 ROUGE-1 43.94 # 21
ROUGE-2 21.40 # 13
ROUGE-L 41.28 # 14
Multi-Document Summarization Multi-News LongT5 ROUGE-2 19.43 # 2
ROUGE-1 48.17 # 2
ROUGE-SU4 24.94 # 1
Text Summarization Pubmed LongT5 ROUGE-1 50.23 # 3
ROUGE-2 24.76 # 1
ROUGE-L 46.67 # 1
Long-range modeling SCROLLS LongT5 Base GovRep 57.7 / 30.0 / 31.4 # 5
SumScr 34.8 / 9.6 / 21.1 # 7
QMSum 33.9 / 11.0 / 22.8 # 5
Qspr 46.6 # 6
Nrtv 23.0 # 7
QALT EM-T/H 37.9 / 36.6 # 4
CNLI 85.6 # 7
Avg. 38.6 # 5
Long-range modeling SCROLLS LongT5 Large GovRep 61.3/32.2/33.8 # 11
SumScr 60.3 / 31.1 / 32.8 # 1
QMSum 35.1 / 12.0 / 23.3 # 1
Qspr 52.3 # 3
Nrtv 27.2 # 3
QALT EM-T/H 40.6 / 38.6 # 3
CNLI 87.3 # 4
Avg. 41.03 # 3
Long-range modeling SCROLLS LongT5 XL GovRep 61.1 / 32.3 / 33.7 # 1
SumScr 35.8 / 9.6 / 21.1 # 3
QMSum 34.9 / 11.8 / 23.5 # 3
Qspr 53.1 # 2
Nrtv 29.3 # 2
QALT EM-T/H 46.0 / 42.1 # 1
CNLI 88.2 # 3
Avg. 42.53 # 2

Methods