2017/11/06 by Karim Ahmed, Ahmed, Karim, Nitish Shirish Keskar +3 · 7 citations
Computer Science · #Algorithms and Data Compression #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1711.02132
openalex publication_date 2017/11/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution completely. Instead, it uses only self-attention and feed-forward layers. While the proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on several machine translation tasks, it requires a large number of parameters and training iterations to converge. We propose Weighted Transformer, a Transformer with modified attention layers, that not only outperforms the baseline network in BLEU score but also converges 15-40% faster. Specifically, we replace the multi-head attention by multiple self-attention branches that the model learns to combine during the training process. Our model improves the state-of-the-art performance by 0.5 BLEU points on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task and by 0.4 on the English-to-French translation task.