Shiyi Qi


2023

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Once is Enough: A Light-Weight Cross-Attention for Fast Sentence Pair Modeling
Yuanhang Yang | Shiyi Qi | Chuanyi Liu | Qifan Wang | Cuiyun Gao | Zenglin Xu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Transformer-based models have achieved great success on sentence pair modeling tasks, such as answer selection and natural language inference (NLI). These models generally perform cross-attention over input pairs, leading to prohibitive computational cost. Recent studies propose dual-encoder and late interaction architectures for faster computation. However, the balance between the expressive of cross-attention and computation speedup still needs better coordinated. To this end, this paper introduces a novel paradigm TopicAns for efficient sentence pair modeling. TopicAns involves a lightweight cross-attention mechanism. It conducts query encoding only once while modeling the query-candidate interaction in parallel. Extensive experiments conducted on four tasks demonstrate that our TopicAnscan speed up sentence pairing by over 113x while achieving comparable performance as the more expensive cross-attention models.