Graph Convolutions Enrich the Self-Attention in Transformers!

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Transformers, renowned for their self-attention mechanism, have achieved state-ofthe-art performance across various tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, time-series modeling, etc. However, one of the challenges with deep Transformer models is the oversmoothing problem, where representations across layers converge to indistinguishable values, leading to significant performance degradation. We interpret the original self-attention as a simple graph filter and redesign it from a graph signal processing (GSP) perspective.