Title
Influence Patterns for Explaining Information Flow in BERT.
Abstract
While attention is all you need may be proving true, we do not know why: attention-based transformer models such as BERT are superior but how information flows from input tokens to output predictions are unclear. We introduce influence patterns, abstractions of sets of paths through a transformer model. Patterns quantify and localize the flow of information to paths passing through a sequence of model nodes. Experimentally, we find that significant portion of information flow in BERT goes through skip connections instead of attention heads. We further show that consistency of patterns across instances is an indicator of BERT’s performance. Finally, we demonstrate that patterns account for far more model performance than previous attention-based and layer-based methods.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kaiji Lu121.05
Zifan Wang200.34
Piotr Mardziel301.01
Anupam Datta4161787.21