arXiv:2608.27241cs.LG2026-08

为表格数据的Transformer注意力头设计重要性评分,提升可解释性与效率。

Importance Scoring of Transformer Attention Heads in Learning Tabular Data

论文配图:Importance Scoring of Transformer Attention Heads in Learning Tabular Data
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出注意力头重要性评分,按得分高低逐步移除头以评估影响。
  • 72.5%情况下移除低分头后模型性能最稳定,移除高分头损失最大。
  • 不同数据集间注意力头重要性差异大,无固定层偏好,适合表格建模研究者。

计算开销大且黑箱性强的深度学习模型可通过分析其数据转换机制获得更好理解与优化。尽管深度Transformer在计算机视觉和自然语言处理中被广泛研究,但在表格数据中的应用仍相对不足。本文首次将重要性评分方法应用于多头Transformer模型,以解读其在表格数据学习中的行为。在40个多样化的表格数据集上进行实验,结果表明基于所提重要性得分的头移除策略具有鲁棒性:在72.5%的实验案例中,逐步移除重要性最低的头时,模型性能下降最小;反之,先移除最重要头会导致分类性能最大降幅。对六个注意力层中个体头的重要性分析显示,关键头分布于各层,无明显层间趋势。与图像和语言领域不同,表格数据集中注意力头的重要性因数据模式和特征空间差异而显著变化。该重要性评分有助于提升Transformer架构的效率与冗余控制。源代码已公开可用。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Computationally demanding and opaque deep learning models can be better understood and optimized by analyzing how they transform data. While deep transformers have been widely studied in computer vision and natural language processing, their application in tabular data remains relatively underexplored. This paper presents one of the first applications of an importance-scoring metric to interpret multi-head transformer models in learning from tabular data. Experiments conducted on 40 diverse tabular datasets demonstrate robustness to head drops based on the proposed head importance score. In 72.5\% of experimental examples, the model remains most resilient to performance drops when heads with the lowest importance scores are gradually removed. In contrast, removing the most important attention head first results in the greatest reduction in classification performance. A closer look at individual head importance scores across six attention layers reveals that important heads are scattered across layers, with no consistent layer-specific trends. In contrast to the image and language domains, the importance of individual attention heads varies considerably across tabular datasets with different schemas and feature spaces. The proposed importance score can improve efficiency and redundancy within transformer architectures. We make the source code for measuring the importance of individual attention heads publicly available.

Transformer注意力机制表格数据可解释性

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