Sliceformer: Make Multi-head Attention as Simple as Sorting in Discriminative Tasks

TL;DR

Sliceformer introduces a simple sorting-based alternative to multi-head attention in Transformers, reducing complexity and improving efficiency while maintaining or enhancing performance across various discriminative tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel slicing-sorting mechanism as a surrogate for multi-head attention, significantly simplifying the Transformer architecture and reducing computational costs.

Findings

Achieves comparable or better performance than traditional Transformers.

Demonstrates lower memory usage and faster computation.

Suppresses mode collapse in data representation.

Abstract

As one of the most popular neural network modules, Transformer plays a central role in many fundamental deep learning models, e.g., the ViT in computer vision and the BERT and GPT in natural language processing. The effectiveness of the Transformer is often attributed to its multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism. In this study, we discuss the limitations of MHA, including the high computational complexity due to its ``query-key-value'' architecture and the numerical issue caused by its softmax operation. Considering the above problems and the recent development tendency of the attention layer, we propose an effective and efficient surrogate of the Transformer, called Sliceformer. Our Sliceformer replaces the classic MHA mechanism with an extremely simple ``slicing-sorting'' operation, i.e., projecting inputs linearly to a latent space and sorting them along different feature dimensions (or equivalently, called channels). For each feature dimension, the sorting operation implicitly generates an implicit attention map with sparse, full-rank, and doubly-stochastic structures. We consider different implementations of the slicing-sorting operation and analyze their impacts on the Sliceformer. We test the Sliceformer in the Long-Range Arena benchmark, image classification, text classification, and molecular property prediction, demonstrating its advantage in computational complexity and universal effectiveness in discriminative tasks. Our Sliceformer achieves comparable or better performance with lower memory cost and faster speed than the Transformer and its variants. Moreover, the experimental results reveal that applying our Sliceformer can empirically suppress the risk of mode collapse when representing data. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/SDS-Lab/sliceformer}.