Transformer Language Models Handle Word Frequency in Prediction Head
Goro Kobayashi, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Sho Yokoi, Kentaro Inui
Abstract
Prediction head is a crucial component of Transformer language models. Despite its direct impact on prediction, this component has often been overlooked in analyzing Transformers.In this study, we investigate the inner workings of the prediction head, specifically focusing on bias parameters. Our experiments with BERT and GPT-2 models reveal that the biases in their word prediction heads play a significant role in the models’ ability to reflect word frequency in a corpus, aligning with the logit adjustment method commonly used in long-tailed learning. We also quantify the effect of controlling the biases in practical auto-regressive text generation scenarios;under a particular setting, more diverse text can be generated without compromising text quality.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-acl.276
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4523–4535
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.276
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.276
- Cite (ACL):
- Goro Kobayashi, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Sho Yokoi, and Kentaro Inui. 2023. Transformer Language Models Handle Word Frequency in Prediction Head. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 4523–4535, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Transformer Language Models Handle Word Frequency in Prediction Head (Kobayashi et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-acl.276.pdf