Still on working...

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing, the 2017 paper "Attention is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. marked a pivotal turning point. Introducing the Transformer architecture, this groundbreaking work dispensed with traditional recurrent and convolutional neural networks in favor of a novel attention mechanism. By focusing solely on attention mechanisms, the Transformer revolutionized how machines understand and generate human language, enabling more efficient and scalable models. This paradigm shift not only enhanced performance on a variety of language tasks but also paved the way for advancements like BERT and GPT. In this article, I explore the foundational concepts, innovations, and lasting impact of the "Attention is All You Need" paper, focusing on the fundamental ideas.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/annotated-transformer/#background

Model Architecture

The Whole Encoder-Decoder Structure

class EncoderDecoder(nn.Module):
    """
    A standard Encoder-Decoder architecture. Base for this and many
    other models.
    """

    def __init__(self, encoder, decoder, src_embed, tgt_embed, generator):
        super(EncoderDecoder, self).__init__()
        self.encoder = encoder
        self.decoder = decoder
        self.src_embed = src_embed
        self.tgt_embed = tgt_embed
        self.generator = generator

    def forward(self, src, tgt, src_mask, tgt_mask):
        "Take in and process masked src and target sequences."
        return self.decode(self.encode(src, src_mask), src_mask, tgt, tgt_mask)

    def encode(self, src, src_mask):
        return self.encoder(self.src_embed(src), src_mask)

    def decode(self, memory, src_mask, tgt, tgt_mask):
        return self.decoder(self.tgt_embed(tgt), memory, src_mask, tgt_mask)

class Generator(nn.Module):
    "Define standard linear + softmax generation step."

    def __init__(self, d_model, vocab):
        super(Generator, self).__init__()
        self.proj = nn.Linear(d_model, vocab)

    def forward(self, x):
        return log_softmax(self.proj(x), dim=-1)

The Encoder Part

The encoder is composed of a stack of N=6N=6 identical layers.

def clones(module, N):
    "Produce N identical layers."
    return nn.ModuleList([copy.deepcopy(module) for _ in range(N)])

class Encoder(nn.Module):
    "Core encoder is a stack of N layers"

    def __init__(self, layer, N):
        super(Encoder, self).__init__()
        self.layers = clones(layer, N)
        self.norm = LayerNorm(layer.size)

    def forward(self, x, mask):
        "Pass the input (and mask) through each layer in turn."
        for layer in self.layers:
            x = layer(x, mask)
        return self.norm(x)

class LayerNorm(nn.Module):
    "Construct a layernorm module (See citation for details)."

    def __init__(self, features, eps=1e-6):
        super(LayerNorm, self).__init__()
        self.a_2 = nn.Parameter(torch.ones(features))
        self.b_2 = nn.Parameter(torch.zeros(features))
        self.eps = eps

    def forward(self, x):
        mean = x.mean(-1, keepdim=True)
        std = x.std(-1, keepdim=True)
        return self.a_2 * (x - mean) / (std + self.eps) + self.b_2

class SublayerConnection(nn.Module):
    """
    A residual connection followed by a layer norm.
    Note for code simplicity the norm is first as opposed to last.
    """

    def __init__(self, size, dropout):
        super(SublayerConnection, self).__init__()
        self.norm = LayerNorm(size)
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)

    def forward(self, x, sublayer):
        "Apply residual connection to any sublayer with the same size."
        return x + self.dropout(sublayer(self.norm(x)))

class EncoderLayer(nn.Module):
    "Encoder is made up of self-attn and feed forward (defined below)"

    def __init__(self, size, self_attn, feed_forward, dropout):
        super(EncoderLayer, self).__init__()
        self.self_attn = self_attn
        self.feed_forward = feed_forward
        self.sublayer = clones(SublayerConnection(size, dropout), 2)
        self.size = size

    def forward(self, x, mask):
        "Follow Figure 1 (left) for connections."
        x = self.sublayer[0](x, lambda x: self.self_attn(x, x, x, mask))
        return self.sublayer[1](x, self.feed_forward)