One Wide Feedforward is All You Need

This paper was accepted at the WMT conference at EMNLP.

The Transformer architecture has two main non-embedding components: Attention and the Feed Forward Network (FFN). Attention captures interdependencies between words regardless of their position, while the FFN non-linearly transforms each input token independently. In this work, we explore the role of FFN and find that despite, and find that despite taking up a significant fraction of the model’s parameters, it is highly redundant. Concretely, we are able to substantially reduce the number of parameters with only a modest drop in accuracy by removing the FFN on the decoder layers and sharing a single FFN across the encoder. Finally, we scale this architecture back to its original size by increasing the hidden dimension of the shared FFN, achieving substantial gains in both accuracy and latency with respect to the original Transformer Big.