Yann Lecun

Also published as: Yann LeCun


2021

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Transformer visualization via dictionary learning: contextualized embedding as a linear superposition of transformer factors
Zeyu Yun | Yubei Chen | Bruno Olshausen | Yann LeCun
Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): The 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures

Transformer networks have revolutionized NLP representation learning since they were introduced. Though a great effort has been made to explain the representation in transformers, it is widely recognized that our understanding is not sufficient. One important reason is that there lack enough visualization tools for detailed analysis. In this paper, we propose to use dictionary learning to open up these ‘black boxes’ as linear superpositions of transformer factors. Through visualization, we demonstrate the hierarchical semantic structures captured by the transformer factors, e.g., word-level polysemy disambiguation, sentence-level pattern formation, and long-range dependency. While some of these patterns confirm the conventional prior linguistic knowledge, the rest are relatively unexpected, which may provide new insights. We hope this visualization tool can bring further knowledge and a better understanding of how transformer networks work. The code is available at: https://github.com/zeyuyun1/TransformerVis.

2017

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Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Text Classification
Alexis Conneau | Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault | Yann Lecun
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

The dominant approach for many NLP tasks are recurrent neural networks, in particular LSTMs, and convolutional neural networks. However, these architectures are rather shallow in comparison to the deep convolutional networks which have pushed the state-of-the-art in computer vision. We present a new architecture (VDCNN) for text processing which operates directly at the character level and uses only small convolutions and pooling operations. We are able to show that the performance of this model increases with the depth: using up to 29 convolutional layers, we report improvements over the state-of-the-art on several public text classification tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that very deep convolutional nets have been applied to text processing.