Several studies have reported the inability of Transformer models to generalize compositionally, a key type of generalization in many NLP tasks such as semantic parsing. In this paper we explore the design space of Transformer models showing that the inductive biases given to the model by several design decisions significantly impact compositional generalization. We identified Transformer configurations that generalize compositionally significantly better than previously reported in the literature in many compositional tasks. We achieve state-of-the-art results in a semantic parsing compositional generalization benchmark (COGS), and a string edit operation composition benchmark (PCFG).

Recent work has shown that either (1) increasing the input length or (2) increasing model size can improve the performance of Transformer-based neural models. In this paper, we present LongT5, a new model that explores the effects of scaling both the input length and model size at the same time. Specifically, we integrate attention ideas from long-input transformers (ETC), and adopt pre-training strategies from summarization pre-training (PEGASUS) into the scalable T5 architecture. The result is a new attention mechanism we call Transient Global (TGlobal), which mimics ETC’s local/global attention mechanism, but without requiring additional side-inputs. We are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on several summarization and question answering tasks, as well as outperform the original T5 models on these tasks. We have open sourced our architecture and training code, as well as our pre-trained model checkpoints.

We show that Transformer encoder architectures can be sped up, with limited accuracy costs, by replacing the self-attention sublayers with simple linear transformations that “mix” input tokens. Most surprisingly, we find that replacing the self-attention sublayer in a Transformer encoder with a standard, unparameterized Fourier Transform achieves 92-97% of the accuracy of BERT counterparts on the GLUE benchmark, but trains 80% faster on GPUs and 70% faster on TPUs at standard 512 input lengths. At longer input lengths, our FNet model is significantly faster: when compared to the “efficient Transformers” on the Long Range Arena benchmark, FNet matches the accuracy of the most accurate models, while outpacing the fastest models across all sequence lengths on GPUs (and across relatively shorter lengths on TPUs). Finally, FNet has a light memory footprint and is particularly efficient at smaller model sizes; for a fixed speed and accuracy budget, small FNet models outperform Transformer counterparts.

Compositional generalization is the ability to generalize systematically to a new data distribution by combining known components. Although humans seem to have a great ability to generalize compositionally, state-of-the-art neural models struggle to do so. In this work, we study compositional generalization in classification tasks and present two main contributions. First, we study ways to convert a natural language sequence-to-sequence dataset to a classification dataset that also requires compositional generalization. Second, we show that providing structural hints (specifically, providing parse trees and entity links as attention masks for a Transformer model) helps compositional generalization.

Transformer models have advanced the state of the art in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present a new Transformer architecture, “Extended Transformer Construction” (ETC), that addresses two key challenges of standard Transformer architectures, namely scaling input length and encoding structured inputs. To scale attention to longer inputs, we introduce a novel global-local attention mechanism between global tokens and regular input tokens. We also show that combining global-local attention with relative position encodings and a “Contrastive Predictive Coding” (CPC) pre-training objective allows ETC to encode structured inputs. We achieve state-of-the-art results on four natural language datasets requiring long and/or structured inputs.