

Overview
The Longformer model was presented in Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer by Iz Beltagy, Matthew E. Peters, Arman Cohan.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
Transformer-based models are unable to process long sequences due to their self-attention operation, which scales
quadratically with the sequence length. To address this limitation, we introduce the Longformer with an attention
mechanism that scales linearly with sequence length, making it easy to process documents of thousands of tokens or
longer. Longformer's attention mechanism is a drop-in replacement for the standard self-attention and combines a local
windowed attention with a task motivated global attention. Following prior work on long-sequence transformers, we
evaluate Longformer on character-level language modeling and achieve state-of-the-art results on text8 and enwik8. In
contrast to most prior work, we also pretrain Longformer and finetune it on a variety of downstream tasks. Our
pretrained Longformer consistently outperforms RoBERTa on long document tasks and sets new state-of-the-art results on
WikiHop and TriviaQA.
This model was contributed by beltagy. The Authors' code can be found here.
Usage tips