DropDim: A Regularization Method for Transformer Networks
Journal: IEEE Signal Processing Letters
Year: 2022

We introduce DropDim, a structured dropout method designed for regularizing the self-attention mechanism, which is a key component of the transformer. In contrast to the general dropout method, which randomly drops neurons, DropDim drops part of the embedding dimensions. In this way, the semantic information can be completely discarded. Thus, the excessive co-adapting between different embedding dimensions can be broken, and the self-attention is forced to encode meaningful features with a certa