Hmm, 0.8 works well, but let's try setting lower layers to lower initial value. Let's say 0.2. Ok, I need a formula that will go between 0.2 and 0.8, slowly approaching 0.8. Starts fiddling with numbers for 20min, I guess this can work.

A whole lot of things are tuned optimally by rotating an analog dial until things look / sound right.

Looks like this makes (at least initially in training) the “negative” attention term smaller in the early layers (smaller l) compared to later layers (larger l). Which I guess makes sense: you probably want to attend a little bit to everything before concluding that it’s really a few spots you should look at.

(Although it seems the author do not discuss this choice anywhere in the paper?)