Simon J.D. Prince


2021

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Optimizing Deeper Transformers on Small Datasets
Peng Xu | Dhruv Kumar | Wei Yang | Wenjie Zi | Keyi Tang | Chenyang Huang | Jackie Chi Kit Cheung | Simon J.D. Prince | Yanshuai Cao
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

It is a common belief that training deep transformers from scratch requires large datasets. Consequently, for small datasets, people usually use shallow and simple additional layers on top of pre-trained models during fine-tuning. This work shows that this does not always need to be the case: with proper initialization and optimization, the benefits of very deep transformers can carry over to challenging tasks with small datasets, including Text-to-SQL semantic parsing and logical reading comprehension. In particular, we successfully train 48 layers of transformers, comprising 24 fine-tuned layers from pre-trained RoBERTa and 24 relation-aware layers trained from scratch. With fewer training steps and no task-specific pre-training, we obtain the state of the art performance on the challenging cross-domain Text-to-SQL parsing benchmark Spider. We achieve this by deriving a novel Data dependent Transformer Fixed-update initialization scheme (DT-Fixup), inspired by the prior T-Fixup work. Further error analysis shows that increasing depth can help improve generalization on small datasets for hard cases that require reasoning and structural understanding.