Hypoformer: Hybrid Decomposition Transformer for Edge-friendly Neural Machine Translation

AbstractTransformer has been demonstrated effective in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, it is memory-consuming and time-consuming in edge devices, resulting in some difficulties for real-time feedback. To compress and accelerate Transformer, we propose a Hybrid Tensor-Train (HTT) decomposition, which retains full rank and meanwhile reduces operations and parameters. A Transformer using HTT, named Hypoformer, consistently and notably outperforms the recent light-weight SOTA methods on three standard translation tasks under different parameter and speed scales. In extreme low resource scenarios, Hypoformer has 7.1 points absolute improvement in BLEU and 1.27 X speedup than vanilla Transformer on IWSLT’14 De-En task.