Transformer (machine learning model)
Attention is all you need paper
A neural network architecture by Google.
It is currently the best at NLP tasks and has mostly replaced RNNs for these tasks.
Architecture
The Transformer uses an encoder-decoder architecture.
Both the encoder and decoder are comprised of multiple identical layers which have
attention and feedforward sublayers.
Positional Encoding
The positional encoding is a sine wave which is added (not concatenated) to the word embeddings. See the original paper for details.
Today, people use learned embeddings.
Attention
Attention is the main contribution of the transformer architecture.
The attention block outputs a weighted average of values in a dictionary of key-value pairs.
In the image above:
- \(\displaystyle Q\) represents queries (each query is a vector)
- \(\displaystyle K\) represents keys
- \(\displaystyle V\) represents values
The attention block can be represented as the following equation:
- \(\displaystyle Z = \operatorname{SoftMax}(\frac{QK^T}{\sqrt{d_k}})V\)
Each word embedded gets its own key, query, and value vectors which are stacked alongside those of other words to form K, Q, and V matrices.
These K, Q, and V matrices are computed by multiplying the embedding matrix \(\displaystyle X\) with weights \(\displaystyle W_{K}, W_{Q}, W_{V}\).
In multi-headed attention, you have multiple \(\displaystyle W_{K}, W_{Q}, W_{V}\) and get an output for each attention head \(\displaystyle Z_i\).
These are concatenated and multiplied by another weight matrix to form the output \(\displaystyle Z\), the input to the next layer of the block.
Encoder
The entire encoder receives as input the input embedding added to a positional encoding.
The encoder is comprised of N=6 blocks, each with 2 layers.
Each block contains a multi-headed attention layer followed by a feed-forward layer.
The feed-forward layer is applied to each word individually.
Each of the two layers of the encoder is a residual layer with an add-and-normalize residual connection.
Decoder
Each decoder consists of a self-attention, an encoder-decoder attention, and a feed-forward layer.
Code
See Hugging Face
Resources
- Guides and explanations