novel positional encoding scheme. Our method not only enables capturing longer-term dependency, but also resolves the
context fragmentation problem. As a result, Transformer-XL learns dependency that is 80% longer than RNNs and 450%
longer than vanilla Transformers, achieves better performance on both short and long sequences, and is up to 1,800+
times faster than vanilla Transformers during evaluation. Notably, we improve the state-of-the-art results of
bpc/perplexity to 0.99 on enwiki8, 1.08 on text8, 18.3 on WikiText-103, 21.8 on One Billion Word, and 54.5 on Penn
Treebank (without finetuning). When trained only on WikiText-103, Transformer-XL manages to generate reasonably
coherent, novel text articles with thousands of tokens.
Tips:
Transformer-XL uses relative sinusoidal positional embeddings. Padding can be done on the left or on the right. The
