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RealFormer: Transformer Likes Residual Attention

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arxiv 2012.11747 v3 pith:YRVJVUDV submitted 2020-12-21 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords realformertransformerattentiongoogle-researchmodelsresidualbackbonebert
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Transformer is the backbone of modern NLP models. In this paper, we propose RealFormer, a simple and generic technique to create Residual Attention Layer Transformer networks that significantly outperform the canonical Transformer and its variants (BERT, ETC, etc.) on a wide spectrum of tasks including Masked Language Modeling, GLUE, SQuAD, Neural Machine Translation, WikiHop, HotpotQA, Natural Questions, and OpenKP. We also observe empirically that RealFormer stabilizes training and leads to models with sparser attention. Source code and pre-trained checkpoints for RealFormer can be found at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/realformer.

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Forward citations

Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Why Post-Norm Transformers Collapse: Attention Amplification and Gradient Repair Failure

    cs.LG 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Token similarity in Post-Norm decoders is amplified by causal attention at initialization, and RMSNorm backward contraction prevents gradients from repairing the resulting collapse.

  2. EdgeGFL: Rethinking Edge Information in Graph Feature Preference Learning

    cs.LG 2025-02 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    EdgeGFL multiplies node messages by learned edge-type vectors to implement per-dimension feature preference in heterogeneous graph neural networks, reporting small gains over prior GNN baselines.

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