Understanding the Expressive Power and Mechanisms of Transformer for Sequence Modeling
We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the dot-product self-attention, positional encoding and feed-forward layer, affect its expressive power, and we study their combined effects through establishing explicit approximation rates. Our study reveals the roles of critical parameters in the Transformer, such as the number of layers and the number of attention heads, and these insights also provide natural suggestions for alternative architectures.
PDF AbstractTasks
Datasets
Add Datasets
introduced or used in this paper
Results from the Paper
Submit
results from this paper
to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the
community compare results to other papers.
