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Title: How Does BERT Answer Questions? A Layer-Wise Analysis of Transformer Representations

Paper content:
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks.
However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and unsatisfactory.
In order to better understand BERT and other Transformer-based models, we present a layer-wise analysis of BERT's hidden states.
Unlike previous research, which mainly focuses on explaining Transformer models by their \hbox{attention} weights, we argue that hidden states contain equally valuable information.
Specifically, our analysis focuses on models fine-tuned on the task of Question Answering (QA) as an example of a complex downstream task.
We inspect how QA models transform token vectors in order to find the correct answer.
To this end, we apply a set of general and QA-specific probing tasks that reveal the information stored in each representation layer.
Our qualitative analysis of hidden state visualizations provides additional insights into BERT's reasoning process.
Our results show that the transformations within BERT go through phases that are related to traditional pipeline tasks.
The system can therefore implicitly incorporate task-specific information into its token representations.
Furthermore, our analysis reveals that fine-tuning has little impact on the models' semantic abilities and that prediction errors can be recognized in the vector representations of even early layers.
In recent months, Transformer models have become more and more prevalent in the field of Natural Language Processing.
Originally they became popular for their improvements over RNNs in Machine Translation BID36 .
Now however, with the advent of large models and an equally large amount of pre-training being done, they have Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.
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CIKM '19, November 3rd-7th, 2019, Beijing, China.
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM.
. . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn proven adept at solving many of the standard Natural Language Processing tasks. Main subject of this paper is BERT BID8 , arguably the most popular of the recent Transformer models and the first to display significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art models in a number of different benchmarks and tasks.Problem of black box models. Deep Learning models achieve increasingly impressive results across a number of different domains, whereas their application to real-world tasks has been moving somewhat more slowly. One major impediment lies in the lack of transparency, reliability and prediction guarantees in these largely black box models.While Transformers are commonly believed to be moderately interpretable through the inspection of their attention values, current research suggests that this may not always be the case BID15 . This paper takes a different approach to the interpretation of said Transformer Networks. Instead of evaluating attention values, our approach examines the hidden states between encoder layers directly. There are multiple questions this paper will address:(1) Do Transformers answer questions decompositionally, in a similar manner to humans? (2) Do specific layers in a multi-layer Transformer network solve different tasks? (3) What influence does fine-tuning have on a network's inner state? (4) Can an evaluation of network layers help come to a conclusion on why and how a network failed to predict a correct answer?We discuss these questions on the basis of fine-tuned models on standard QA datasets. We choose the task of Question Answering as an example of a complex downstream task that, as this paper will show, requires solving a multitude of other Natural Language Processing tasks. Additionally, it has been shown that other NLP tasks can be successfully framed as QA tasks BID22 , therefore our analysis should translate to these tasks as well. While this work focuses on the BERT architecture, we perform preliminary tests on the small GPT-2 model BID28 as well, which yield similar results.
Training Results.
TAB3 shows the evaluation results of our best models.
Accuracy on the SQuAD task is close to human performance, indicating that the model can fulfill all sub-tasks required to answer SQuAD's questions.
As expected the tasks derived from HotpotQA prove much more challenging, with the distractor setting being the most difficult to solve.
Unsurprisingly too, bAbI was easily solved by both BERT and GPT-2.
While GPT-2 performs significantly worse in the more difficult tasks of SQuAD and HotpotQA, it does considerably better on bAbi reducing the validation error to nearly 0.
Most of BERT's error in the bAbI multi-task setting comes from tasks 17 and 19.
Both of these tasks require positional or geometric reasoning, thus it is reasonable to assume that this is a skill where GPT-2 improves on BERT's reasoning capabilities.Presentation of Analysis Results.
The qualitative analysis of vector transformations reveals a range of recurring patterns.
In the following, we present these patterns by two representative samples from the SQuAD and bAbI task dataset described in TAB1 .
Examples from HotpotQA can be found in the supplementary material as they require more space due to the larger context.
Results from probing tasks are displayed in FIG1 .
We compare results in macro-averaged F1 over all network layers.
FIG1 shows results from three models of BERT-base with twelve layers: Fine-tuned on SQuAD,on bAbI tasks and without fine-tuning.
FIG2 reports results of two models based on BERT-large with 24 layers: Fine-tuned on HotpotQA and without fine-tuning.
Our work reveals important findings about the inner functioning of Transformer networks.
The impact of these findings and how future work can build upon them is described in the following: CIKM '19, November 3rd-7th, 2019, Beijing, China.Anon.
Interpretability.
The qualitative analysis of token vectors reveals that there is indeed interpretable information stored within the hidden states of Transformer models.
This information can be used to identify misclassified examples and model weaknesses.
It also provides clues about which parts of the context the model considered important for answering a question -a crucial part of decision legitimisation.
We leave the development of methods to further process this information for future work.Transferability.
We further show that lower layers might be more applicable to certain problems than later ones.
For a Transfer Learning task, this means layer depth should be chosen individually depending on the task at hand.
We also suggest further work regarding skip connections in Transformer layers to examine whether direct information transfer between non-adjacent layers (that solve different tasks) can be of advantage.Modularity.
Our findings support the hypothesis that not only do different phases exist in Transformer networks, but that specific layers seem to solve different problems.
This hints at a kind of modularity that can potentially be exploited in the training process.
For example, it could be beneficial to fit parts of the network to specific tasks in pre-training, instead of using an end-to-end language model task.Our work aims towards revealing some of the internal processes within Transformer-based models.
We suggest to direct further research at thoroughly understanding state-of-the-art models and the way they solve downstream tasks, in order to improve on them.

assistant: text: We investigate hidden state activations of Transformer Models in Question Answering Tasks.