【Transformer】20、SOFT: Softmax-free Transformer with Linear Complexity

### GCN (Graph Convolutional Network) vs Transformer: Differences and Use Cases in Deep Learning #### Architectural Design The architectural design of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) fundamentally differs from Transformers. GCNs operate on graph data structures, where nodes represent entities and edges denote relationships between these entities. This architecture allows GCNs to effectively capture local neighborhood information through message passing mechanisms among connected nodes[^2]. In contrast, Transformers leverage self-attention mechanisms which enable modeling dependencies regardless of their position within sequences without relying on predefined adjacency matrices as seen in GCNs. #### Data Structure Handling GCNs excel at handling non-Euclidean structured data such as social networks or molecular graphs due to the inherent ability to model complex relational patterns present in graph topologies. On the other hand, Transformers have been primarily designed for sequential data like text but can also be adapted to handle tabular or time-series datasets by treating them as tokenized inputs into multi-head attention layers followed by feed-forward networks. #### Computational Complexity In terms of computational complexity, both architectures exhibit different characteristics depending upon specific implementations and optimization techniques applied during training phases. For instance, while standard GCNs may suffer scalability issues when dealing with large-scale sparse graphs because they require repeated matrix multiplications involving entire node sets per layer propagation step; recent advancements including sampling-based methods alleviate some concerns regarding efficiency losses associated with dense connectivity assumptions made earlier versions of this framework. Transformers generally demand higher memory footprints compared to traditional recurrent neural network variants owing largely towards quadratic scaling behavior concerning sequence length inside softmax operations performed across all positions simultaneously via scaled dot-product attentions mechanism – although linearized alternatives exist nowadays aiming specifically toward reducing resource consumption levels significantly over long contexts processing tasks. #### Application Scenarios When considering application scenarios suitable for each type of deep learning methodology mentioned above: - **GCNs**: Ideal candidates include applications requiring analysis based around irregularly shaped domains characterized by explicit interdependencies amongst elements forming part thereof e.g., recommendation systems leveraging collaborative filtering principles alongside citation prediction models built atop academic publication databases. - **Transformers**: Well-suited for natural language understanding challenges ranging from machine translation up until question answering frameworks along with multimodal fusion endeavors incorporating heterogeneous sensory modalities beyond just textual representations alone - exemplified recently through vision-language pretraining paradigms achieving state-of-the-art performance metrics reported throughout various benchmark evaluations conducted under controlled experimental settings[^1]. ```python import torch.nn.functional as F from torch_geometric.nn import GCNConv class SimpleGCN(torch.nn.Module): def __init__(self): super(SimpleGCN, self).__init__() self.conv1 = GCNConv(dataset.num_features, 16) self.conv2 = GCNConv(16, dataset.num_classes) def forward(self, data): x, edge_index = data.x, data.edge_index x = self.conv1(x, edge_index) x = F.relu(x) x = F.dropout(x, training=self.training) x = self.conv2(x, edge_index) return F.log_softmax(x, dim=1) import math import torch import torch.nn as nn import torch.nn.functional as F class PositionwiseFeedForward(nn.Module): "Implements FFN equation." def __init__(self, d_model, d_ff, dropout=0.1): super(PositionwiseFeedForward, self).__init__() self.w_1 = nn.Linear(d_model, d_ff) self.w_2 = nn.Linear(d_ff, d_model) self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout) def forward(self, x): return self.w_2(self.dropout(F.relu(self.w_1(x)))) ```