Bayesian Attention Belief Networks

Shujian Zhang, Xinjie Fan, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Zhou
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 139:12413-12426, 2021.

Abstract

Attention-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks. Most such models use deterministic attention while stochastic attention is less explored due to the optimization difficulties or complicated model design. This paper introduces Bayesian attention belief networks, which construct a decoder network by modeling unnormalized attention weights with a hierarchy of gamma distributions, and an encoder network by stacking Weibull distributions with a deterministic-upward-stochastic-downward structure to approximate the posterior. The resulting auto-encoding networks can be optimized in a differentiable way with a variational lower bound. It is simple to convert any models with deterministic attention, including pretrained ones, to the proposed Bayesian attention belief networks. On a variety of language understanding tasks, we show that our method outperforms deterministic attention and state-of-the-art stochastic attention in accuracy, uncertainty estimation, generalization across domains, and robustness to adversarial attacks. We further demonstrate the general applicability of our method on neural machine translation and visual question answering, showing great potential of incorporating our method into various attention-related tasks.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v139-zhang21f, title = {Bayesian Attention Belief Networks}, author = {Zhang, Shujian and Fan, Xinjie and Chen, Bo and Zhou, Mingyuan}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {12413--12426}, year = {2021}, editor = {Meila, Marina and Zhang, Tong}, volume = {139}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {18--24 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhang21f/zhang21f.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhang21f.html}, abstract = {Attention-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks. Most such models use deterministic attention while stochastic attention is less explored due to the optimization difficulties or complicated model design. This paper introduces Bayesian attention belief networks, which construct a decoder network by modeling unnormalized attention weights with a hierarchy of gamma distributions, and an encoder network by stacking Weibull distributions with a deterministic-upward-stochastic-downward structure to approximate the posterior. The resulting auto-encoding networks can be optimized in a differentiable way with a variational lower bound. It is simple to convert any models with deterministic attention, including pretrained ones, to the proposed Bayesian attention belief networks. On a variety of language understanding tasks, we show that our method outperforms deterministic attention and state-of-the-art stochastic attention in accuracy, uncertainty estimation, generalization across domains, and robustness to adversarial attacks. We further demonstrate the general applicability of our method on neural machine translation and visual question answering, showing great potential of incorporating our method into various attention-related tasks.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Bayesian Attention Belief Networks %A Shujian Zhang %A Xinjie Fan %A Bo Chen %A Mingyuan Zhou %B Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2021 %E Marina Meila %E Tong Zhang %F pmlr-v139-zhang21f %I PMLR %P 12413--12426 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhang21f.html %V 139 %X Attention-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks. Most such models use deterministic attention while stochastic attention is less explored due to the optimization difficulties or complicated model design. This paper introduces Bayesian attention belief networks, which construct a decoder network by modeling unnormalized attention weights with a hierarchy of gamma distributions, and an encoder network by stacking Weibull distributions with a deterministic-upward-stochastic-downward structure to approximate the posterior. The resulting auto-encoding networks can be optimized in a differentiable way with a variational lower bound. It is simple to convert any models with deterministic attention, including pretrained ones, to the proposed Bayesian attention belief networks. On a variety of language understanding tasks, we show that our method outperforms deterministic attention and state-of-the-art stochastic attention in accuracy, uncertainty estimation, generalization across domains, and robustness to adversarial attacks. We further demonstrate the general applicability of our method on neural machine translation and visual question answering, showing great potential of incorporating our method into various attention-related tasks.
APA
Zhang, S., Fan, X., Chen, B. & Zhou, M.. (2021). Bayesian Attention Belief Networks. Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 139:12413-12426 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhang21f.html.

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