Making Transformers Solve Compositional Tasks
Santiago Ontanon, Joshua Ainslie, Zachary Fisher, Vaclav Cvicek
Abstract
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).- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-long.251
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Editors:
- Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3591–3607
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.251
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.251
- Cite (ACL):
- Santiago Ontanon, Joshua Ainslie, Zachary Fisher, and Vaclav Cvicek. 2022. Making Transformers Solve Compositional Tasks. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3591–3607, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Making Transformers Solve Compositional Tasks (Ontanon et al., ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.acl-long.251.pdf
- Code
- google-research/google-research
- Data
- CFQ, SCAN