TLM: Token-Level Masking for Transformers
Yangjun Wu, Kebin Fang, Dongxiang Zhang, Han Wang, Hao Zhang, Gang Chen · 2023
Structured dropout approaches, such as attention dropout and DropHead, have been investigated to regularize the multi-head attention mechanism in Transformers.In this paper, we propose a new regularization scheme based on token-level rather than structure-level to reduce overfitting.Specifically, we devise a novel Token-Level Masking (TLM) training strategy for Transformers to regularize the connections of self-attention, which consists of two masking techniques that are effective and easy to implement.The underlying idea is to manipulate the connections between tokens in the multi-head attention via masking, where the networks are forced to exploit partial neighbors' information to produce a meaningful representation.The generality and effectiveness of TLM are thoroughly evaluated via extensive experiments on 4 diversified NLP tasks across 18 datasets, including natural language understanding benchmark GLUE, ChineseGLUE, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction, and data-to-text generation.The results indicate that TLM can consistently outperform attention dropout and DropHead, e.g., it increases by 0.5 points relative to DropHead with BERT-large on GLUE.Moreover, TLM can establish a new record on the data-to-text benchmark Rotowire (18.93 BLEU).Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Young1993/tlm.