The Conformer Encoder May Reverse the Time Dimension
Journal: arXiv (Cornell University)
Year: 2024

We sometimes observe monotonically decreasing cross-attention weights in our Conformer-based global attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models, Further investigation shows that the Conformer encoder reverses the sequence in the time dimension. We analyze the initial behavior of the decoder cross-attention mechanism and find that it encourages the Conformer encoder self-attention to build a connection between the initial frames and all other informative frames. Furthermore, we show that, at som