English

Enhancing the Transformer with Explicit Relational Encoding for Math Problem Solving

Machine Learning 2020-11-05 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We incorporate Tensor-Product Representations within the Transformer in order to better support the explicit representation of relation structure. Our Tensor-Product Transformer (TP-Transformer) sets a new state of the art on the recently-introduced Mathematics Dataset containing 56 categories of free-form math word-problems. The essential component of the model is a novel attention mechanism, called TP-Attention, which explicitly encodes the relations between each Transformer cell and the other cells from which values have been retrieved by attention. TP-Attention goes beyond linear combination of retrieved values, strengthening representation-building and resolving ambiguities introduced by multiple layers of standard attention. The TP-Transformer's attention maps give better insights into how it is capable of solving the Mathematics Dataset's challenging problems. Pretrained models and code will be made available after publication.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.06611,
  title  = {Enhancing the Transformer with Explicit Relational Encoding for Math Problem Solving},
  author = {Imanol Schlag and Paul Smolensky and Roland Fernandez and Nebojsa Jojic and Jürgen Schmidhuber and Jianfeng Gao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.06611},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:43:55.756Z