English

Tricks and Plug-ins for Gradient Boosting with Transformers

Machine Learning 2025-11-04 v4 Machine Learning

Abstract

Transformer architectures dominate modern NLP but often demand heavy computational resources and intricate hyperparameter tuning. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a novel framework, BoostTransformer, that augments transformers with boosting principles through subgrid token selection and importance-weighted sampling. Our method incorporates a least square boosting objective directly into the transformer pipeline, enabling more efficient training and improved performance. Across multiple fine-grained text classification benchmarks, BoostTransformer demonstrates both faster convergence and higher accuracy, surpassing standard transformers while minimizing architectural search overhead.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.02924,
  title  = {Tricks and Plug-ins for Gradient Boosting with Transformers},
  author = {Biyi Fang and Truong Vo and Jean Utke and Diego Klabjan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02924},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Update the title of the pdf file only. The old version has a different title to the arxiv abstract. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2203.00761

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:34:14.958Z