One Wide Feedforward is All You Need
Authors: name: Telmo Pessoa Pires; name: António V. Lopes; name: Yannick Assogba; name: Hendra Setiawan
Published: 2023-09-04 21:30:21

Abstract: The Transformer architecture has two main non-embedding components: Attention
and the Feed Forward Network (FFN). Attention captures interdependencies
between words regardless of their position, while the FFN non-linearly
transforms each input token independently. In this work we explore the role of
the FFN, and find that despite taking up a significant fraction of the model's
parameters, it is highly redundant. Concretely, we are able to substantially
reduce the number of parameters with only a modest drop in accuracy by removing
the FFN on the decoder layers and sharing a single FFN across the encoder.
Finally we scale this architecture back to its original size by increasing the
hidden dimension of the shared FFN, achieving substantial gains in both
accuracy and latency with respect to the original Transformer Big.