@inproceedings{gheini-etal-2021-cross,
    title = "Cross-Attention is All You Need: {A}dapting Pretrained {T}ransformers for Machine Translation",
    author = "Gheini, Mozhdeh  and
      Ren, Xiang  and
      May, Jonathan",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2021.emnlp-main.132/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.132",
    pages = "1754--1765",
    abstract = "We study the power of cross-attention in the Transformer architecture within the context of transfer learning for machine translation, and extend the findings of studies into cross-attention when training from scratch. We conduct a series of experiments through fine-tuning a translation model on data where either the source or target language has changed. These experiments reveal that fine-tuning only the cross-attention parameters is nearly as effective as fine-tuning all parameters (i.e., the entire translation model). We provide insights into why this is the case and observe that limiting fine-tuning in this manner yields cross-lingually aligned embeddings. The implications of this finding for researchers and practitioners include a mitigation of catastrophic forgetting, the potential for zero-shot translation, and the ability to extend machine translation models to several new language pairs with reduced parameter storage overhead."
}