07 · EXPERIMENTS

Training Setup

Data & Batching

  • WMT 2014 English–German: 4.5M sentence pairs; English–French: 36M sentences.
  • Byte-pair encoding with a shared source–target vocabulary of ~37K tokens.
  • Batches of ~25,000 source and ~25,000 target tokens, grouped by approximate sequence length.

Optimization & Regularization

  • Adam (β₁ = 0.9, β₂ = 0.98, ε = 10⁻⁹) with warmup: 4,000 linearly increasing steps, then inverse-square-root decay.
  • Residual dropout 0.1 (base) / 0.3 (big); attention dropout on each sub-layer.
  • Label smoothing ε_ls = 0.1 — hurts perplexity but improves accuracy and BLEU.

Hardware & time: 8 × NVIDIA P100 GPUs — base model: 12 hours (100K steps); big model: 3.5 days (300K steps). Beam search with beam size 4, length penalty α = 0.6.

Source: §5 Training (paper p. 7); §6.1 (paper p. 8).