Overview
The BigBird model was proposed in Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences by
Zaheer, Manzil and Guruganesh, Guru and Dubey, Kumar Avinava and Ainslie, Joshua and Alberti, Chris and Ontanon,
Santiago and Pham, Philip and Ravula, Anirudh and Wang, Qifan and Yang, Li and others. BigBird, is a sparse-attention
based transformer which extends Transformer based models, such as BERT to much longer sequences. In addition to sparse
attention, BigBird also applies global attention as well as random attention to the input sequence. Theoretically, it
has been shown that applying sparse, global, and random attention approximates full attention, while being
computationally much more efficient for longer sequences. As a consequence of the capability to handle longer context,
BigBird has shown improved performance on various long document NLP tasks, such as question answering and
