Transformer on a Diet

Abstract: Transformer has been widely used thanks to its ability to capture sequence information in an efficient way. However, recent developments, such as BERT and GPT-2, deliver only heavy architectures with a focus on effectiveness. In this paper, we explore three carefully-designed light Transformer architectures to figure out whether the Transformer with less computations could produce competitive results. Experimental results on LLM benchmark datasets hint that such trade-off is promising, and the light Transformer reduces 70% parameters at best, while obtains competitive perplexity compared to standard Transformer. The source code is publicly available.