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Permutation Equivariance of Transformers and Its Applications by Xu, Hengyuan; Xiang, Liyao; Ye, Hangyu; Yao, Dixi; Chu, Pengzhi; Li, Baochun is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Permutation Equivariance of Transformers and Its Applications about?

Revolutionizing the field of deep learning, Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable performance in many tasks. Recent research has recognized these models are robust to shuffling but are limited to inter-token permutation in the forward propagation. In this work, we propose our definition of permutation equivariance, a broader concept covering both inter- and intra- token permutation in the forward and backward propagation of neural networks. We rigorously proved that such permutation equivariance property can be satisfied on most vanilla Transformer-based models with almost no adaptation. We examine the property over a range of state-of-the-art models including ViT, Bert, GPT, and others, with experimental validations. Further, as a proof-of-concept, we explore how real-world applications including privacy-enhancing split learning, and model authorization, could exploit the permutation equivariance property, which implicates wider, intriguing application scenarios.

Author

Xu, Hengyuan; Xiang, Liyao; Ye, Hangyu; Yao, Dixi; Chu, Pengzhi; Li, Baochun

Published

2023

Language

EN