10.7. Transformer

Colab [mxnet]

Open the notebook in Colab

Colab [pytorch]

Open the notebook in Colab

Colab [tensorflow]

Open the notebook in Colab

SageMaker Studio Lab

Open the notebook in SageMaker Studio Lab

We have compared CNNs, RNNs, and self-attention in Section 10.6.2. Notably, self-attention enjoys both parallel computation and the shortest maximum path length. Therefore natually, it is appealing to design deep architectures by using self-attention. Unlike earlier self-attention models that still rely on RNNs for input representations (), the transformer model is solely based on attention mechanisms without any convolutional or recurrent layer (). Though originally proposed for sequence to sequence learning on text data, transformers have been pervasive in a wide range of modern deep learning applications, such as in areas of language, vision, speech, and reinforcement learning.

10.7.1. Model

As an instance of the encoder-decoder architecture, the overall architecture of the transformer is presented in Fig. 10.7.1. As we can see, the transformer is composed of an encoder and a decoder. Different from Bahdanau attention for sequence to sequence learning in Fig. 10.4.1, the input (source) and output (target) sequence embeddings are added with positional encoding before being fed into the encoder and the decoder that stack modules based on self-attention.

Fig. 10.7.1 The transformer architecture.

Now we provide an overview of the transformer architecture in Fig. 10.7.1. On a high level, the transformer encoder is a stack of multiple identical layers, where each layer has two sublayers (either is denoted as \(\mathrm{sublayer}\)). The first is a multi-head self-attention pooling and the second is a positionwise feed-forward network. Specifically, in the encoder self-attention, queries, keys, and values are all from the the outputs of the previous encoder layer. Inspired by the ResNet design in Section 7.6, a residual connection is employed around both sublayers. In the transformer, for any input \(\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^d\) at any position of the sequence, we require that \(\mathrm{sublayer}(\mathbf{x}) \in \mathbb{R}^d\) so that the residual connection \(\mathbf{x} + \mathrm{sublayer}(\mathbf{x}) \in \mathbb{R}^d\) is feasible. This addition from the residual connection is immediately followed by layer normalization (). As a result, the transformer encoder outputs a \(d\)-dimensional vector representation for each position of the input sequence.

The transformer decoder is also a stack of multiple identical layers with residual connections and layer normalizations. Besides the two sublayers described in the encoder, the decoder inserts a third sublayer, known as the encoder-decoder attention, between these two. In the encoder-decoder attention, queries are from the outputs of the previous decoder layer, and the keys and values are from the transformer encoder outputs. In the decoder self-attention, queries, keys, and values are all from the the outputs of the previous decoder layer. However, each position in the decoder is allowed to only attend to all positions in the decoder up to that position. This masked attention preserves the auto-regressive property, ensuring that the prediction only depends on those output tokens that have been generated.

We have already described and implemented multi-head attention based on scaled dot-products in Section 10.5 and positional encoding in Section 10.6.3. In the following, we will implement the rest of the transformer model.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

import math
import pandas as pd
from mxnet import autograd, np, npx
from mxnet.gluon import nn
from d2l import mxnet as d2l

npx.set_np()

import math
import pandas as pd
import torch
from torch import nn
from d2l import torch as d2l

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import tensorflow as tf
from d2l import tensorflow as d2l

10.7.2. Positionwise Feed-Forward Networks

The positionwise feed-forward network transforms the representation at all the sequence positions using the same MLP. This is why we call it positionwise. In the implementation below, the input X with shape (batch size, number of time steps or sequence length in tokens, number of hidden units or feature dimension) will be transformed by a two-layer MLP into an output tensor of shape (batch size, number of time steps, ffn_num_outputs).

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

#@save
class PositionWiseFFN(nn.Block):
    """Positionwise feed-forward network."""
    def __init__(self, ffn_num_hiddens, ffn_num_outputs, **kwargs):
        super(PositionWiseFFN, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.dense1 = nn.Dense(ffn_num_hiddens, flatten=False,
                               activation='relu')
        self.dense2 = nn.Dense(ffn_num_outputs, flatten=False)

    def forward(self, X):
        return self.dense2(self.dense1(X))

#@save
class PositionWiseFFN(nn.Module):
    """Positionwise feed-forward network."""
    def __init__(self, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, ffn_num_outputs,
                 **kwargs):
        super(PositionWiseFFN, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.dense1 = nn.Linear(ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens)
        self.relu = nn.ReLU()
        self.dense2 = nn.Linear(ffn_num_hiddens, ffn_num_outputs)

    def forward(self, X):
        return self.dense2(self.relu(self.dense1(X)))

#@save
class PositionWiseFFN(tf.keras.layers.Layer):
    """Positionwise feed-forward network."""
    def __init__(self, ffn_num_hiddens, ffn_num_outputs, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*kwargs)
        self.dense1 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(ffn_num_hiddens)
        self.relu = tf.keras.layers.ReLU()
        self.dense2 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(ffn_num_outputs)

    def call(self, X):
        return self.dense2(self.relu(self.dense1(X)))

The following example shows that the innermost dimension of a tensor changes to the number of outputs in the positionwise feed-forward network. Since the same MLP transforms at all the positions, when the inputs at all these positions are the same, their outputs are also identical.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

ffn = PositionWiseFFN(4, 8)
ffn.initialize()
ffn(np.ones((2, 3, 4)))[0]

array([[ 0.00239431,  0.00927085, -0.00021069, -0.00923989, -0.0082903 ,
        -0.00162741,  0.00659031,  0.00023905],
       [ 0.00239431,  0.00927085, -0.00021069, -0.00923989, -0.0082903 ,
        -0.00162741,  0.00659031,  0.00023905],
       [ 0.00239431,  0.00927085, -0.00021069, -0.00923989, -0.0082903 ,
        -0.00162741,  0.00659031,  0.00023905]])

ffn = PositionWiseFFN(4, 4, 8)
ffn.eval()
ffn(torch.ones((2, 3, 4)))[0]

tensor([[-0.4656,  0.1496, -0.4186, -0.0076,  0.0727, -0.2567, -0.0681, -0.2657],
        [-0.4656,  0.1496, -0.4186, -0.0076,  0.0727, -0.2567, -0.0681, -0.2657],
        [-0.4656,  0.1496, -0.4186, -0.0076,  0.0727, -0.2567, -0.0681, -0.2657]],
       grad_fn=<SelectBackward0>)

ffn = PositionWiseFFN(4, 8)
ffn(tf.ones((2, 3, 4)))[0]

<tf.Tensor: shape=(3, 8), dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[ 0.3414163 ,  0.36295098,  1.3574867 , -0.2770774 ,  0.25854135,
         0.6276486 , -0.7040524 , -0.6917964 ],
       [ 0.3414163 ,  0.36295098,  1.3574867 , -0.2770774 ,  0.25854135,
         0.6276486 , -0.7040524 , -0.6917964 ],
       [ 0.3414163 ,  0.36295098,  1.3574867 , -0.2770774 ,  0.25854135,
         0.6276486 , -0.7040524 , -0.6917964 ]], dtype=float32)>

10.7.3. Residual Connection and Layer Normalization

Now let us focus on the “add & norm” component in Fig. 10.7.1. As we described at the beginning of this section, this is a residual connection immediately followed by layer normalization. Both are key to effective deep architectures.

In Section 7.5, we explained how batch normalization recenters and rescales across the examples within a minibatch. Layer normalization is the same as batch normalization except that the former normalizes across the feature dimension. Despite its pervasive applications in computer vision, batch normalization is usually empirically less effective than layer normalization in natural language processing tasks, whose inputs are often variable-length sequences.

The following code snippet compares the normalization across different dimensions by layer normalization and batch normalization.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

ln = nn.LayerNorm()
ln.initialize()
bn = nn.BatchNorm()
bn.initialize()
X = np.array([[1, 2], [2, 3]])
# Compute mean and variance from `X` in the training mode
with autograd.record():
    print('layer norm:', ln(X), '\nbatch norm:', bn(X))

layer norm: [[-0.99998  0.99998]
 [-0.99998  0.99998]]
batch norm: [[-0.99998 -0.99998]
 [ 0.99998  0.99998]]

ln = nn.LayerNorm(2)
bn = nn.BatchNorm1d(2)
X = torch.tensor([[1, 2], [2, 3]], dtype=torch.float32)
# Compute mean and variance from `X` in the training mode
print('layer norm:', ln(X), '\nbatch norm:', bn(X))

layer norm: tensor([[-1.0000,  1.0000],
        [-1.0000,  1.0000]], grad_fn=<NativeLayerNormBackward0>)
batch norm: tensor([[-1.0000, -1.0000],
        [ 1.0000,  1.0000]], grad_fn=<NativeBatchNormBackward0>)

ln = tf.keras.layers.LayerNormalization()
bn = tf.keras.layers.BatchNormalization()
X = tf.constant([[1, 2], [2, 3]], dtype=tf.float32)
print('layer norm:', ln(X), '\nbatch norm:', bn(X, training=True))

layer norm: tf.Tensor(
[[-0.998006   0.9980061]
 [-0.9980061  0.998006 ]], shape=(2, 2), dtype=float32)
batch norm: tf.Tensor(
[[-0.998006   -0.9980061 ]
 [ 0.9980061   0.99800587]], shape=(2, 2), dtype=float32)

Now we can implement the AddNorm class using a residual connection followed by layer normalization. Dropout is also applied for regularization.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

#@save
class AddNorm(nn.Block):
    """Residual connection followed by layer normalization."""
    def __init__(self, dropout, **kwargs):
        super(AddNorm, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)
        self.ln = nn.LayerNorm()

    def forward(self, X, Y):
        return self.ln(self.dropout(Y) + X)

#@save
class AddNorm(nn.Module):
    """Residual connection followed by layer normalization."""
    def __init__(self, normalized_shape, dropout, **kwargs):
        super(AddNorm, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)
        self.ln = nn.LayerNorm(normalized_shape)

    def forward(self, X, Y):
        return self.ln(self.dropout(Y) + X)

#@save
class AddNorm(tf.keras.layers.Layer):
    """Residual connection followed by layer normalization."""
    def __init__(self, normalized_shape, dropout, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
        self.dropout = tf.keras.layers.Dropout(dropout)
        self.ln = tf.keras.layers.LayerNormalization(normalized_shape)

    def call(self, X, Y, **kwargs):
        return self.ln(self.dropout(Y, **kwargs) + X)

The residual connection requires that the two inputs are of the same shape so that the output tensor also has the same shape after the addition operation.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

add_norm = AddNorm(0.5)
add_norm.initialize()
add_norm(np.ones((2, 3, 4)), np.ones((2, 3, 4))).shape

(2, 3, 4)

add_norm = AddNorm([3, 4], 0.5) # Normalized_shape is input.size()[1:]
add_norm.eval()
add_norm(torch.ones((2, 3, 4)), torch.ones((2, 3, 4))).shape

torch.Size([2, 3, 4])

add_norm = AddNorm([1, 2], 0.5) # Normalized_shape is: [i for i in range(len(input.shape))][1:]
add_norm(tf.ones((2, 3, 4)), tf.ones((2, 3, 4)), training=False).shape

TensorShape([2, 3, 4])

10.7.4. Encoder

With all the essential components to assemble the transformer encoder, let us start by implementing a single layer within the encoder. The following EncoderBlock class contains two sublayers: multi-head self-attention and positionwise feed-forward networks, where a residual connection followed by layer normalization is employed around both sublayers.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

#@save
class EncoderBlock(nn.Block):
    """Transformer encoder block."""
    def __init__(self, num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout,
                 use_bias=False, **kwargs):
        super(EncoderBlock, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.attention = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(
            num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout, use_bias)
        self.addnorm1 = AddNorm(dropout)
        self.ffn = PositionWiseFFN(ffn_num_hiddens, num_hiddens)
        self.addnorm2 = AddNorm(dropout)

    def forward(self, X, valid_lens):
        Y = self.addnorm1(X, self.attention(X, X, X, valid_lens))
        return self.addnorm2(Y, self.ffn(Y))

#@save
class EncoderBlock(nn.Module):
    """Transformer encoder block."""
    def __init__(self, key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                 norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
                 dropout, use_bias=False, **kwargs):
        super(EncoderBlock, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.attention = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(
            key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout,
            use_bias)
        self.addnorm1 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)
        self.ffn = PositionWiseFFN(
            ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, num_hiddens)
        self.addnorm2 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)

    def forward(self, X, valid_lens):
        Y = self.addnorm1(X, self.attention(X, X, X, valid_lens))
        return self.addnorm2(Y, self.ffn(Y))

#@save
class EncoderBlock(tf.keras.layers.Layer):
    """Transformer encoder block."""
    def __init__(self, key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                 norm_shape, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout, bias=False, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
        self.attention = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                                                num_heads, dropout, bias)
        self.addnorm1 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)
        self.ffn = PositionWiseFFN(ffn_num_hiddens, num_hiddens)
        self.addnorm2 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)

    def call(self, X, valid_lens, **kwargs):
        Y = self.addnorm1(X, self.attention(X, X, X, valid_lens, **kwargs), **kwargs)
        return self.addnorm2(Y, self.ffn(Y), **kwargs)

As we can see, any layer in the transformer encoder does not change the shape of its input.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

X = np.ones((2, 100, 24))
valid_lens = np.array([3, 2])
encoder_blk = EncoderBlock(24, 48, 8, 0.5)
encoder_blk.initialize()
encoder_blk(X, valid_lens).shape

(2, 100, 24)

X = torch.ones((2, 100, 24))
valid_lens = torch.tensor([3, 2])
encoder_blk = EncoderBlock(24, 24, 24, 24, [100, 24], 24, 48, 8, 0.5)
encoder_blk.eval()
encoder_blk(X, valid_lens).shape

torch.Size([2, 100, 24])

X = tf.ones((2, 100, 24))
valid_lens = tf.constant([3, 2])
norm_shape = [i for i in range(len(X.shape))][1:]
encoder_blk = EncoderBlock(24, 24, 24, 24, norm_shape, 48, 8, 0.5)
encoder_blk(X, valid_lens, training=False).shape

TensorShape([2, 100, 24])

In the following transformer encoder implementation, we stack num_layers instances of the above EncoderBlock classes. Since we use the fixed positional encoding whose values are always between -1 and 1, we multiply values of the learnable input embeddings by the square root of the embedding dimension to rescale before summing up the input embedding and the positional encoding.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

#@save
class TransformerEncoder(d2l.Encoder):
    """Transformer encoder."""
    def __init__(self, vocab_size, num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens,
                 num_heads, num_layers, dropout, use_bias=False, **kwargs):
        super(TransformerEncoder, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.num_hiddens = num_hiddens
        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, num_hiddens)
        self.pos_encoding = d2l.PositionalEncoding(num_hiddens, dropout)
        self.blks = nn.Sequential()
        for _ in range(num_layers):
            self.blks.add(
                EncoderBlock(num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout,
                             use_bias))

    def forward(self, X, valid_lens, *args):
        # Since positional encoding values are between -1 and 1, the embedding
        # values are multiplied by the square root of the embedding dimension
        # to rescale before they are summed up
        X = self.pos_encoding(self.embedding(X) * math.sqrt(self.num_hiddens))
        self.attention_weights = [None] * len(self.blks)
        for i, blk in enumerate(self.blks):
            X = blk(X, valid_lens)
            self.attention_weights[
                i] = blk.attention.attention.attention_weights
        return X

#@save
class TransformerEncoder(d2l.Encoder):
    """Transformer encoder."""
    def __init__(self, vocab_size, key_size, query_size, value_size,
                 num_hiddens, norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens,
                 num_heads, num_layers, dropout, use_bias=False, **kwargs):
        super(TransformerEncoder, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.num_hiddens = num_hiddens
        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, num_hiddens)
        self.pos_encoding = d2l.PositionalEncoding(num_hiddens, dropout)
        self.blks = nn.Sequential()
        for i in range(num_layers):
            self.blks.add_module("block"+str(i),
                EncoderBlock(key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                             norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens,
                             num_heads, dropout, use_bias))

    def forward(self, X, valid_lens, *args):
        # Since positional encoding values are between -1 and 1, the embedding
        # values are multiplied by the square root of the embedding dimension
        # to rescale before they are summed up
        X = self.pos_encoding(self.embedding(X) * math.sqrt(self.num_hiddens))
        self.attention_weights = [None] * len(self.blks)
        for i, blk in enumerate(self.blks):
            X = blk(X, valid_lens)
            self.attention_weights[
                i] = blk.attention.attention.attention_weights
        return X

#@save
class TransformerEncoder(d2l.Encoder):
    """Transformer encoder."""
    def __init__(self, vocab_size, key_size, query_size, value_size,
                 num_hiddens, norm_shape, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
                 num_layers, dropout, bias=False, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
        self.num_hiddens = num_hiddens
        self.embedding = tf.keras.layers.Embedding(vocab_size, num_hiddens)
        self.pos_encoding = d2l.PositionalEncoding(num_hiddens, dropout)
        self.blks = [EncoderBlock(
            key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, norm_shape,
            ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout, bias) for _ in range(
            num_layers)]

    def call(self, X, valid_lens, **kwargs):
        # Since positional encoding values are between -1 and 1, the embedding
        # values are multiplied by the square root of the embedding dimension
        # to rescale before they are summed up
        X = self.pos_encoding(self.embedding(X) * tf.math.sqrt(
            tf.cast(self.num_hiddens, dtype=tf.float32)), **kwargs)
        self.attention_weights = [None] * len(self.blks)
        for i, blk in enumerate(self.blks):
            X = blk(X, valid_lens, **kwargs)
            self.attention_weights[
                i] = blk.attention.attention.attention_weights
        return X

Below we specify hyperparameters to create a two-layer transformer encoder. The shape of the transformer encoder output is (batch size, number of time steps, num_hiddens).

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

encoder = TransformerEncoder(200, 24, 48, 8, 2, 0.5)
encoder.initialize()
encoder(np.ones((2, 100)), valid_lens).shape

(2, 100, 24)

encoder = TransformerEncoder(
    200, 24, 24, 24, 24, [100, 24], 24, 48, 8, 2, 0.5)
encoder.eval()
encoder(torch.ones((2, 100), dtype=torch.long), valid_lens).shape

torch.Size([2, 100, 24])

encoder = TransformerEncoder(200, 24, 24, 24, 24, [1, 2], 48, 8, 2, 0.5)
encoder(tf.ones((2, 100)), valid_lens, training=False).shape

TensorShape([2, 100, 24])

10.7.5. Decoder

As shown in Fig. 10.7.1, the transformer decoder is composed of multiple identical layers. Each layer is implemented in the following DecoderBlock class, which contains three sublayers: decoder self-attention, encoder-decoder attention, and positionwise feed-forward networks. These sublayers employ a residual connection around them followed by layer normalization.

As we described earlier in this section, in the masked multi-head decoder self-attention (the first sublayer), queries, keys, and values all come from the outputs of the previous decoder layer. When training sequence-to-sequence models, tokens at all the positions (time steps) of the output sequence are known. However, during prediction the output sequence is generated token by token; thus, at any decoder time step only the generated tokens can be used in the decoder self-attention. To preserve auto-regression in the decoder, its masked self-attention specifies dec_valid_lens so that any query only attends to all positions in the decoder up to the query position.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

class DecoderBlock(nn.Block):
    # The `i`-th block in the decoder
    def __init__(self, num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
                 dropout, i, **kwargs):
        super(DecoderBlock, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.i = i
        self.attention1 = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(num_hiddens, num_heads,
                                                 dropout)
        self.addnorm1 = AddNorm(dropout)
        self.attention2 = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(num_hiddens, num_heads,
                                                 dropout)
        self.addnorm2 = AddNorm(dropout)
        self.ffn = PositionWiseFFN(ffn_num_hiddens, num_hiddens)
        self.addnorm3 = AddNorm(dropout)

    def forward(self, X, state):
        enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens = state[0], state[1]
        # During training, all the tokens of any output sequence are processed
        # at the same time, so `state[2][self.i]` is `None` as initialized.
        # When decoding any output sequence token by token during prediction,
        # `state[2][self.i]` contains representations of the decoded output at
        # the `i`-th block up to the current time step
        if state[2][self.i] is None:
            key_values = X
        else:
            key_values = np.concatenate((state[2][self.i], X), axis=1)
        state[2][self.i] = key_values

        if autograd.is_training():
            batch_size, num_steps, _ = X.shape
            # Shape of `dec_valid_lens`: (`batch_size`, `num_steps`), where
            # every row is [1, 2, ..., `num_steps`]
            dec_valid_lens = np.tile(np.arange(1, num_steps + 1, ctx=X.ctx),
                                     (batch_size, 1))
        else:
            dec_valid_lens = None

        # Self-attention
        X2 = self.attention1(X, key_values, key_values, dec_valid_lens)
        Y = self.addnorm1(X, X2)
        # Encoder-decoder attention. Shape of `enc_outputs`:
        # (`batch_size`, `num_steps`, `num_hiddens`)
        Y2 = self.attention2(Y, enc_outputs, enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens)
        Z = self.addnorm2(Y, Y2)
        return self.addnorm3(Z, self.ffn(Z)), state

class DecoderBlock(nn.Module):
    # The `i`-th block in the decoder
    def __init__(self, key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                 norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
                 dropout, i, **kwargs):
        super(DecoderBlock, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.i = i
        self.attention1 = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(
            key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout)
        self.addnorm1 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)
        self.attention2 = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(
            key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout)
        self.addnorm2 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)
        self.ffn = PositionWiseFFN(ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens,
                                   num_hiddens)
        self.addnorm3 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)

    def forward(self, X, state):
        enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens = state[0], state[1]
        # During training, all the tokens of any output sequence are processed
        # at the same time, so `state[2][self.i]` is `None` as initialized.
        # When decoding any output sequence token by token during prediction,
        # `state[2][self.i]` contains representations of the decoded output at
        # the `i`-th block up to the current time step
        if state[2][self.i] is None:
            key_values = X
        else:
            key_values = torch.cat((state[2][self.i], X), axis=1)
        state[2][self.i] = key_values
        if self.training:
            batch_size, num_steps, _ = X.shape
            # Shape of `dec_valid_lens`: (`batch_size`, `num_steps`), where
            # every row is [1, 2, ..., `num_steps`]
            dec_valid_lens = torch.arange(
                1, num_steps + 1, device=X.device).repeat(batch_size, 1)
        else:
            dec_valid_lens = None

        # Self-attention
        X2 = self.attention1(X, key_values, key_values, dec_valid_lens)
        Y = self.addnorm1(X, X2)
        # Encoder-decoder attention. Shape of `enc_outputs`:
        # (`batch_size`, `num_steps`, `num_hiddens`)
        Y2 = self.attention2(Y, enc_outputs, enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens)
        Z = self.addnorm2(Y, Y2)
        return self.addnorm3(Z, self.ffn(Z)), state

class DecoderBlock(tf.keras.layers.Layer):
    # The `i`-th block in the decoder
    def __init__(self, key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                 norm_shape, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout, i, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
        self.i = i
        self.attention1 = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout)
        self.addnorm1 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)
        self.attention2 = d2l.MultiHeadAttention(key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout)
        self.addnorm2 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)
        self.ffn = PositionWiseFFN(ffn_num_hiddens, num_hiddens)
        self.addnorm3 = AddNorm(norm_shape, dropout)

    def call(self, X, state, **kwargs):
        enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens = state[0], state[1]
        # During training, all the tokens of any output sequence are processed
        # at the same time, so `state[2][self.i]` is `None` as initialized.
        # When decoding any output sequence token by token during prediction,
        # `state[2][self.i]` contains representations of the decoded output at
        # the `i`-th block up to the current time step
        if state[2][self.i] is None:
            key_values = X
        else:
            key_values = tf.concat((state[2][self.i], X), axis=1)
        state[2][self.i] = key_values
        if kwargs["training"]:
            batch_size, num_steps, _ = X.shape
            # Shape of `dec_valid_lens`: (`batch_size`, `num_steps`), where
            # every row is [1, 2, ..., `num_steps`]
            dec_valid_lens = tf.repeat(tf.reshape(tf.range(1, num_steps + 1),
                                                 shape=(-1, num_steps)), repeats=batch_size, axis=0)

        else:
            dec_valid_lens = None

        # Self-attention
        X2 = self.attention1(X, key_values, key_values, dec_valid_lens, **kwargs)
        Y = self.addnorm1(X, X2, **kwargs)
        # Encoder-decoder attention. Shape of `enc_outputs`: (`batch_size`, `num_steps`, `num_hiddens`)
        Y2 = self.attention2(Y, enc_outputs, enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, **kwargs)
        Z = self.addnorm2(Y, Y2, **kwargs)
        return self.addnorm3(Z, self.ffn(Z), **kwargs), state

To facilitate scaled dot-product operations in the encoder-decoder attention and addition operations in the residual connections, the feature dimension (num_hiddens) of the decoder is the same as that of the encoder.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

decoder_blk = DecoderBlock(24, 48, 8, 0.5, 0)
decoder_blk.initialize()
X = np.ones((2, 100, 24))
state = [encoder_blk(X, valid_lens), valid_lens, [None]]
decoder_blk(X, state)[0].shape

(2, 100, 24)

decoder_blk = DecoderBlock(24, 24, 24, 24, [100, 24], 24, 48, 8, 0.5, 0)
decoder_blk.eval()
X = torch.ones((2, 100, 24))
state = [encoder_blk(X, valid_lens), valid_lens, [None]]
decoder_blk(X, state)[0].shape

torch.Size([2, 100, 24])

decoder_blk = DecoderBlock(24, 24, 24, 24, [1, 2], 48, 8, 0.5, 0)
X = tf.ones((2, 100, 24))
state = [encoder_blk(X, valid_lens), valid_lens, [None]]
decoder_blk(X, state, training=False)[0].shape

TensorShape([2, 100, 24])

Now we construct the entire transformer decoder composed of num_layers instances of DecoderBlock. In the end, a fully-connected layer computes the prediction for all the vocab_size possible output tokens. Both of the decoder self-attention weights and the encoder-decoder attention weights are stored for later visualization.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

class TransformerDecoder(d2l.AttentionDecoder):
    def __init__(self, vocab_size, num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens,
                 num_heads, num_layers, dropout, **kwargs):
        super(TransformerDecoder, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.num_hiddens = num_hiddens
        self.num_layers = num_layers
        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, num_hiddens)
        self.pos_encoding = d2l.PositionalEncoding(num_hiddens, dropout)
        self.blks = nn.Sequential()
        for i in range(num_layers):
            self.blks.add(
                DecoderBlock(num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
                             dropout, i))
        self.dense = nn.Dense(vocab_size, flatten=False)

    def init_state(self, enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, *args):
        return [enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, [None] * self.num_layers]

    def forward(self, X, state):
        X = self.pos_encoding(self.embedding(X) * math.sqrt(self.num_hiddens))
        self._attention_weights = [[None] * len(self.blks) for _ in range (2)]
        for i, blk in enumerate(self.blks):
            X, state = blk(X, state)
            # Decoder self-attention weights
            self._attention_weights[0][
                i] = blk.attention1.attention.attention_weights
            # Encoder-decoder attention weights
            self._attention_weights[1][
                i] = blk.attention2.attention.attention_weights
        return self.dense(X), state

    @property
    def attention_weights(self):
        return self._attention_weights

class TransformerDecoder(d2l.AttentionDecoder):
    def __init__(self, vocab_size, key_size, query_size, value_size,
                 num_hiddens, norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens,
                 num_heads, num_layers, dropout, **kwargs):
        super(TransformerDecoder, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.num_hiddens = num_hiddens
        self.num_layers = num_layers
        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, num_hiddens)
        self.pos_encoding = d2l.PositionalEncoding(num_hiddens, dropout)
        self.blks = nn.Sequential()
        for i in range(num_layers):
            self.blks.add_module("block"+str(i),
                DecoderBlock(key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
                             norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens,
                             num_heads, dropout, i))
        self.dense = nn.Linear(num_hiddens, vocab_size)

    def init_state(self, enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, *args):
        return [enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, [None] * self.num_layers]

    def forward(self, X, state):
        X = self.pos_encoding(self.embedding(X) * math.sqrt(self.num_hiddens))
        self._attention_weights = [[None] * len(self.blks) for _ in range (2)]
        for i, blk in enumerate(self.blks):
            X, state = blk(X, state)
            # Decoder self-attention weights
            self._attention_weights[0][
                i] = blk.attention1.attention.attention_weights
            # Encoder-decoder attention weights
            self._attention_weights[1][
                i] = blk.attention2.attention.attention_weights
        return self.dense(X), state

    @property
    def attention_weights(self):
        return self._attention_weights

class TransformerDecoder(d2l.AttentionDecoder):
    def __init__(self, vocab_size, key_size, query_size, value_size,
                 num_hiddens, norm_shape, ffn_num_hidens, num_heads, num_layers, dropout, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
        self.num_hiddens = num_hiddens
        self.num_layers = num_layers
        self.embedding = tf.keras.layers.Embedding(vocab_size, num_hiddens)
        self.pos_encoding = d2l.PositionalEncoding(num_hiddens, dropout)
        self.blks = [DecoderBlock(key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, norm_shape,
                                  ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, dropout, i) for i in range(num_layers)]
        self.dense = tf.keras.layers.Dense(vocab_size)

    def init_state(self, enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, *args):
        return [enc_outputs, enc_valid_lens, [None] * self.num_layers]

    def call(self, X, state, **kwargs):
        X = self.pos_encoding(self.embedding(X) * tf.math.sqrt(tf.cast(self.num_hiddens, dtype=tf.float32)), **kwargs)
        self._attention_weights = [[None] * len(self.blks) for _ in range(2)]  # 2 Attention layers in decoder
        for i, blk in enumerate(self.blks):
            X, state = blk(X, state, **kwargs)
            # Decoder self-attention weights
            self._attention_weights[0][i] = blk.attention1.attention.attention_weights
            # Encoder-decoder attention weights
            self._attention_weights[1][i] = blk.attention2.attention.attention_weights
        return self.dense(X), state

    @property
    def attention_weights(self):
        return self._attention_weights

10.7.6. Training

Let us instantiate an encoder-decoder model by following the transformer architecture. Here we specify that both the transformer encoder and the transformer decoder have 2 layers using 4-head attention. Similar to Section 9.7.4, we train the transformer model for sequence to sequence learning on the English-French machine translation dataset.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

num_hiddens, num_layers, dropout, batch_size, num_steps = 32, 2, 0.1, 64, 10
lr, num_epochs, device = 0.005, 200, d2l.try_gpu()
ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads = 64, 4

train_iter, src_vocab, tgt_vocab = d2l.load_data_nmt(batch_size, num_steps)

encoder = TransformerEncoder(
    len(src_vocab), num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, num_layers,
    dropout)
decoder = TransformerDecoder(
    len(tgt_vocab), num_hiddens, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, num_layers,
    dropout)
net = d2l.EncoderDecoder(encoder, decoder)
d2l.train_seq2seq(net, train_iter, lr, num_epochs, tgt_vocab, device)

loss 0.030, 2201.9 tokens/sec on gpu(0)

num_hiddens, num_layers, dropout, batch_size, num_steps = 32, 2, 0.1, 64, 10
lr, num_epochs, device = 0.005, 200, d2l.try_gpu()
ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads = 32, 64, 4
key_size, query_size, value_size = 32, 32, 32
norm_shape = [32]

train_iter, src_vocab, tgt_vocab = d2l.load_data_nmt(batch_size, num_steps)

encoder = TransformerEncoder(
    len(src_vocab), key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
    norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
    num_layers, dropout)
decoder = TransformerDecoder(
    len(tgt_vocab), key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens,
    norm_shape, ffn_num_input, ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads,
    num_layers, dropout)
net = d2l.EncoderDecoder(encoder, decoder)
d2l.train_seq2seq(net, train_iter, lr, num_epochs, tgt_vocab, device)

loss 0.031, 4599.2 tokens/sec on cuda:0

num_hiddens, num_layers, dropout, batch_size, num_steps = 32, 2, 0.1, 64, 10
lr, num_epochs, device = 0.005, 200, d2l.try_gpu()
ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads = 64, 4
key_size, query_size, value_size = 32, 32, 32
norm_shape = [2]

train_iter, src_vocab, tgt_vocab = d2l.load_data_nmt(batch_size, num_steps)
encoder = TransformerEncoder(
    len(src_vocab), key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, norm_shape,
    ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, num_layers, dropout)
decoder = TransformerDecoder(
    len(tgt_vocab), key_size, query_size, value_size, num_hiddens, norm_shape,
    ffn_num_hiddens, num_heads, num_layers, dropout)
net = d2l.EncoderDecoder(encoder, decoder)
d2l.train_seq2seq(net, train_iter, lr, num_epochs, tgt_vocab, device)

loss 0.028, 821.4 tokens/sec on <tensorflow.python.eager.context._EagerDeviceContext object at 0x7f6d78051300>

After training, we use the transformer model to translate a few English sentences into French and compute their BLEU scores.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

engs = ['go .', "i lost .", 'he\'s calm .', 'i\'m home .']
fras = ['va !', 'j\'ai perdu .', 'il est calme .', 'je suis chez moi .']
for eng, fra in zip(engs, fras):
    translation, dec_attention_weight_seq = d2l.predict_seq2seq(
        net, eng, src_vocab, tgt_vocab, num_steps, device, True)
    print(f'{eng} => {translation}, ',
          f'bleu {d2l.bleu(translation, fra, k=2):.3f}')

go . => va !,  bleu 1.000
i lost . => j'ai perdu .,  bleu 1.000
he's calm . => il est calme .,  bleu 1.000
i'm home . => je suis chez moi <unk> .,  bleu 0.803

engs = ['go .', "i lost .", 'he\'s calm .', 'i\'m home .']
fras = ['va !', 'j\'ai perdu .', 'il est calme .', 'je suis chez moi .']
for eng, fra in zip(engs, fras):
    translation, dec_attention_weight_seq = d2l.predict_seq2seq(
        net, eng, src_vocab, tgt_vocab, num_steps, device, True)
    print(f'{eng} => {translation}, ',
          f'bleu {d2l.bleu(translation, fra, k=2):.3f}')

go . => va !,  bleu 1.000
i lost . => j'ai perdu .,  bleu 1.000
he's calm . => il est calme .,  bleu 1.000
i'm home . => je suis chez moi .,  bleu 1.000

engs = ['go .', "i lost .", 'he\'s calm .', 'i\'m home .']
fras = ['va !', 'j\'ai perdu .', 'il est calme .', 'je suis chez moi .']
for eng, fra in zip(engs, fras):
    translation, dec_attention_weight_seq = d2l.predict_seq2seq(
        net, eng, src_vocab, tgt_vocab, num_steps, True)
    print(f'{eng} => {translation}, ',
          f'bleu {d2l.bleu(translation, fra, k=2):.3f}')

go . => va !,  bleu 1.000
i lost . => j'ai perdu .,  bleu 1.000
he's calm . => il est malade est malade .,  bleu 0.473
i'm home . => je suis chez moi .,  bleu 1.000

Let us visualize the transformer attention weights when translating the last English sentence into French. The shape of the encoder self-attention weights is (number of encoder layers, number of attention heads, num_steps or number of queries, num_steps or number of key-value pairs).

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

enc_attention_weights = np.concatenate(net.encoder.attention_weights, 0).reshape((num_layers,
    num_heads, -1, num_steps))
enc_attention_weights.shape

(2, 4, 10, 10)

enc_attention_weights = torch.cat(net.encoder.attention_weights, 0).reshape((num_layers, num_heads,
    -1, num_steps))
enc_attention_weights.shape

torch.Size([2, 4, 10, 10])

enc_attention_weights = tf.reshape(
    tf.concat(net.encoder.attention_weights, 0),
    (num_layers, num_heads, -1, num_steps))
enc_attention_weights.shape

TensorShape([2, 4, 10, 10])

In the encoder self-attention, both queries and keys come from the same input sequence. Since padding tokens do not carry meaning, with specified valid length of the input sequence, no query attends to positions of padding tokens. In the following, two layers of multi-head attention weights are presented row by row. Each head independently attends based on a separate representation subspaces of queries, keys, and values.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

d2l.show_heatmaps(
    enc_attention_weights, xlabel='Key positions', ylabel='Query positions',
    titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)], figsize=(7, 3.5))

d2l.show_heatmaps(
    enc_attention_weights.cpu(), xlabel='Key positions',
    ylabel='Query positions', titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)],
    figsize=(7, 3.5))

d2l.show_heatmaps(
    enc_attention_weights, xlabel='Key positions', ylabel='Query positions',
    titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)], figsize=(7, 3.5))

To visualize both the decoder self-attention weights and the encoder-decoder attention weights, we need more data manipulations. For example, we fill the masked attention weights with zero. Note that the decoder self-attention weights and the encoder-decoder attention weights both have the same queries: the beginning-of-sequence token followed by the output tokens.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

dec_attention_weights_2d = [np.array(head[0]).tolist()
                            for step in dec_attention_weight_seq
                            for attn in step for blk in attn for head in blk]
dec_attention_weights_filled = np.array(
    pd.DataFrame(dec_attention_weights_2d).fillna(0.0).values)
dec_attention_weights = dec_attention_weights_filled.reshape((-1, 2, num_layers, num_heads, num_steps))
dec_self_attention_weights, dec_inter_attention_weights = \
    dec_attention_weights.transpose(1, 2, 3, 0, 4)
dec_self_attention_weights.shape, dec_inter_attention_weights.shape

((2, 4, 7, 10), (2, 4, 7, 10))

dec_attention_weights_2d = [head[0].tolist()
                            for step in dec_attention_weight_seq
                            for attn in step for blk in attn for head in blk]
dec_attention_weights_filled = torch.tensor(
    pd.DataFrame(dec_attention_weights_2d).fillna(0.0).values)
dec_attention_weights = dec_attention_weights_filled.reshape((-1, 2, num_layers, num_heads, num_steps))
dec_self_attention_weights, dec_inter_attention_weights = \
    dec_attention_weights.permute(1, 2, 3, 0, 4)
dec_self_attention_weights.shape, dec_inter_attention_weights.shape

(torch.Size([2, 4, 6, 10]), torch.Size([2, 4, 6, 10]))

dec_attention_weights_2d = [head[0] for step in dec_attention_weight_seq
                            for attn in step
                            for blk in attn for head in blk]
dec_attention_weights_filled = tf.convert_to_tensor(
    np.asarray(pd.DataFrame(dec_attention_weights_2d).fillna(
        0.0).values).astype(np.float32))
dec_attention_weights = tf.reshape(dec_attention_weights_filled, shape=(
    -1, 2, num_layers, num_heads, num_steps))
dec_self_attention_weights, dec_inter_attention_weights = tf.transpose(
    dec_attention_weights, perm=(1, 2, 3, 0, 4))
print(dec_self_attention_weights.shape, dec_inter_attention_weights.shape)

(2, 4, 6, 10) (2, 4, 6, 10)

Due to the auto-regressive property of the decoder self-attention, no query attends to key-value pairs after the query position.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

# Plus one to include the beginning-of-sequence token
d2l.show_heatmaps(
    dec_self_attention_weights[:, :, :, :len(translation.split()) + 1],
    xlabel='Key positions', ylabel='Query positions',
    titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)], figsize=(7, 3.5))

# Plus one to include the beginning-of-sequence token
d2l.show_heatmaps(
    dec_self_attention_weights[:, :, :, :len(translation.split()) + 1],
    xlabel='Key positions', ylabel='Query positions',
    titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)], figsize=(7, 3.5))

# Plus one to include the beginning-of-sequence token
d2l.show_heatmaps(
    dec_self_attention_weights[:, :, :, :len(translation.split()) + 1],
    xlabel='Key positions', ylabel='Query positions',
    titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)], figsize=(7, 3.5))

Similar to the case in the encoder self-attention, via the specified valid length of the input sequence, no query from the output sequence attends to those padding tokens from the input sequence.

mxnetpytorchtensorflow

d2l.show_heatmaps(
    dec_inter_attention_weights, xlabel='Key positions',
    ylabel='Query positions', titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)],
    figsize=(7, 3.5))

d2l.show_heatmaps(
    dec_inter_attention_weights, xlabel='Key positions',
    ylabel='Query positions', titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)],
    figsize=(7, 3.5))

d2l.show_heatmaps(
    dec_inter_attention_weights, xlabel='Key positions',
    ylabel='Query positions', titles=['Head %d' % i for i in range(1, 5)],
    figsize=(7, 3.5))

Although the transformer architecture was originally proposed for sequence-to-sequence learning, as we will discover later in the book, either the transformer encoder or the transformer decoder is often individually used for different deep learning tasks.

10.7.7. Summary

• The transformer is an instance of the encoder-decoder architecture, though either the encoder or the decoder can be used individually in practice.

• In the transformer, multi-head self-attention is used for representing the input sequence and the output sequence, though the decoder has to preserve the auto-regressive property via a masked version.

• Both the residual connections and the layer normalization in the transformer are important for training a very deep model.

• The positionwise feed-forward network in the transformer model transforms the representation at all the sequence positions using the same MLP.

10.7.8. Exercises

1. Train a deeper transformer in the experiments. How does it affect the training speed and the translation performance?

2. Is it a good idea to replace scaled dot-product attention with additive attention in the transformer? Why?

3. For language modeling, should we use the transformer encoder, decoder, or both? How to design this method?

4. What can be challenges to transformers if input sequences are very long? Why?

5. How to improve computational and memory efficiency of transformers? Hint: you may refer to the survey paper by Tay et al. ().

6. How can we design transformer-based models for image classification tasks without using CNNs? Hint: you may refer to the vision transformer ().

mxnetpytorch

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