Share
Explore

Building the simple AI language model using PyTorch and TensorFlow to demonstrate transformer operations

image.png
Learning guide about transformers in the context of large language models, and how to build a simple application using PyTorch and TensorFlow to demonstrate transformer operations.

Introduction to Transformers

Understanding the Transformer Architecture
Implementing a Transformer with PyTorch
Implementing a Transformer with TensorFlow
Building a Simple Application to Demonstrate Transformer Operations

1. Introduction to Transformers
What are transformers?
Origins of transformers: Attention is All You Need paper
Importance of transformers in natural language processing (NLP)
Overview of large language models (LLMs)
2. Understanding the Transformer Architecture
Deep dive into the architecture components
Encoder and decoder stacks
Self-attention mechanism
Positional encodings
Feed-forward neural networks
Layer normalization and residual connections
How transformers facilitate parallel processing of sequences
Importance of attention mechanism in capturing context
3. Implementing a Transformer with PyTorch
PyTorch introduction: Dynamic computation graph
Setting up the PyTorch environment
Building blocks of transformer in PyTorch
Defining the self-attention module
Implementing positional encoding
Composing the encoder and decoder
Constructing the complete transformer model
Training a transformer model with PyTorch on a simple task (e.g., language modeling)
4. Implementing a Transformer with TensorFlow
TensorFlow introduction: Static computation graph
Setting up the TensorFlow environment
Building blocks of transformer in TensorFlow
Defining the self-attention module with TensorFlow and Keras layers
Implementing positional encoding with TensorFlow operations
Composing the encoder and decoder with Keras
Constructing the complete transformer model
Training a transformer model with TensorFlow on a simple task (e.g., machine translation)
5. Building a Simple Application to Demonstrate Transformer Operations
Selecting a simple use case (e.g., sentiment analysis, text classification)
Preparing the dataset
Applying the previously built transformer models to the task
Evaluating the model's performance
Discussion on how the transformer's self-attention mechanism contributes to its predictions
Each section will contain explanations, diagrams, sample code, and exercises. It is important to include both explanations and practical hands-on activities to facilitate learning.
Before we continue with detailed content creation, is there any specific aspect you would like to alter or add to the guide? Also, since you've uploaded a file, do you wish me to use any of its content for the guide?
word embeddings - how are they trained? How are they used? in and with transformers?

Understanding Word Embeddings

How they are trained

Their role in transformers.

Understanding Word Embeddings
What are word embeddings?
Why are word embeddings important in NLP?
Training word embeddings
Overview of techniques: Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText
Concept of context and dimensionality reduction
Training process and objective functions
Word embeddings in transformers
Role in the input layer of transformer models
Positional encodings combined with word embeddings
How transformers learn contextualized embeddings

What are Word Embeddings?

Word embeddings are dense vector representations of words in a continuous vector space where semantically similar words are mapped to nearby points.
They are fundamental to modern NLP tasks because they capture semantic meanings, syntactic roles, and even relationships among words.
error

To introduce students to word embeddings in R with no prior knowledge of the underlying math, let’s use a hands-on approach starting with a high-level understanding and then moving to coding exercises that leverage pre-trained word embeddings.

Since directly training word embeddings can involve complex concepts, using a pre-trained model helps to illustrate the idea without delving into the deeper math initially.

R offers a package called text that can be used to work with pre-trained word embeddings. Let's use the text package in R for these exercises, along with a pre-trained set of word embeddings such as the GloVe vectors.
Step 1: Installing and Loading Required Packages
Before starting the exercise, ensure you have R and the necessary packages installed.
They will need to install the text package if they haven’t already:
rinstall.packages("text") Open in:Code Editor
Now, load the text package:
rlibrary(text) Open in:Code Editor
Step 2: Loading Pre-trained Word Embeddings
The text package allows easy downloading and usage of pre-trained embeddings:
r# This will download the pre-trained word vectors and store them in an R object embeddings <- textEmbeddings() Open in:Code Editor
Step 3: Exploring Word Embeddings
Now, let's explore the word embeddings to see how words are represented as vectors:
# Get the vector representation of the word 'king' king_vector <- embeddings$word_vectors[rownames(embeddings$word_vectors) == "king",] print(king_vector)
# Get the vector representation for a few words
words <- c("queen", "man", "woman", "throne", "crown")
vectors <- embeddings$word_vectors[rownames(embeddings$word_vectors) %in% words,] print(vectors)
Step 4: Visualizing Word Embeddings
We might want to visualize these vectors in 2D space to get an intuitive sense of their relationships.
This requires dimension reduction which can be performed using methods like PCA (Principal Component Analysis).
Here we will use PCA to reduce dimensionality and subsequently plot these vectors:
library(ggplot2)
# Apply PCA pca <- prcomp(embeddings$word_vectors) pca_vectors <- as.data.frame(pca$x)
# Plot the first two PCA components of some words selected_words <- c("king", "queen", "man", "woman", "throne", "crown") selected_vectors <- pca_vectors[rownames(pca_vectors) %in% selected_words, 1:2] # Select first two components selected_vectors$word <- rownames(selected_vectors) # Add words as labels
ggplot(selected_vectors, aes(x = PC1, y = PC2, label = word)) + geom_text(aes(label = word)) + geom_point() + theme_minimal()
Step 5: Finding Similar Words
You can use word embeddings to find words that are semantically similar to a given word:
# Find words similar to 'king'
similar_words <- textSimilarity("king", embeddings = embeddings) print(similar_words)
Step 6: Analogies with Word Embeddings
Word embeddings can also capture relationships between words. Analogies like "Man is to King as Woman is to ?" can be explored using pre-trained embeddings:
# Solving the analogy Man is to King as Woman is to ?
result <- textAnalogies(c("man", "king", "woman"), embeddings = embeddings) print(result)
These exercises will give students a good foundation in understanding word embeddings before diving into the more complex mathematics and training processes.

Why are Word Embeddings Important in NLP?

Embeddings provide a way to convert categorical data (words) into numerical form that machine learning models can process.
They enable models to understand the semantic and syntactic nuances of language by creating a representation that reflects word usage in context.

Training Word Embeddings

Word embeddings are trained using large text corpora. Popular algorithms for training word embeddings include:
Word2Vec: Uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text.
GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation): Uses matrix factorization based on word co-occurrence within a corpus.
FastText: Extends Word2Vec to consider subword information, which is useful for understanding suffixes and prefixes and for better handling of rare words.
These methods involve looking at words in their context and capturing these contexts in the word embedding space using different objective functions such as predicting a word based on its context (Word2Vec's continuous bag-of-words, CBOW) or predicting context words given a target word (Word2Vec's skip-gram).

Word Embeddings in Transformers

In transformers, word embeddings are used as the initial representation of words and are the input to the encoder and decoder stacks. Unlike earlier methods that provide the same embedding for a word regardless of context, transformers can provide context-dependent embeddings.
Input Layer: The transformer takes word embeddings as part of its input layer; these embeddings are often initialized with pre-trained embeddings from models like Word2Vec or GloVe but are then further trained in the context of the specific task.
Positional Encodings: Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers does not have a notion of word order, positional encodings are added to the word embeddings to provide sequential information to the model.
Contextualized Embeddings: As the input passes through the transformer's layers with self-attention mechanisms, the model adjusts the embeddings, making them contextualized. This means that the representation of a word can change depending on the other words in the sentence, which allows the model to capture polysemy and other complex language features.
Transformers, such as BERT and its derivatives, have taken this a step further by aiming to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers.
This pre-training step results in embeddings that encapsulate a rich understanding of language and context, outperforming traditional embeddings in many tasks.

Next, we'll look at how to integrate these concepts into a practical application using PyTorch or TensorFlow models.


Let's start with a detailed walkthrough on implementing word embeddings and transformers using PyTorch, and then we'll do the same for TensorFlow.

Both implementations will be created with the intention that they could be run in Google Colab environments, which allow users to execute Python code through the browser.
We will implement a simple transformer model in PyTorch and TensorFlow that is capable of handling a sequence-to-sequence task, such as machine translation or sentiment analysis. Since machine translation is a classic demonstration for sequence-to-sequence models, we will use that for our examples.
Note: The code provided here will be concise and focused on important elements. For a complete lab workbook, additional explanations, comments, and data preprocessing steps would be necessary.

Implementing a Transformer with Word Embeddings in PyTorch

First, we install PyTorch in a Google Colab notebook with the following command:
python!pip install torch torchvision Open in:Code Editor
Now, here is a simplified example of how to define a transformer model with word embeddings in PyTorch:
In the code above, PAD_IDX is the token index used for padding. The masks ensure that the self-attention mechanism only attends to non-padded positions.
Note: Running a training loop and defining a complete dataset and dataloader would exceed the scope of this explanation. However, the main focus here is to provide a skeleton of the implementation.

Implementing a Transformer with Word Embeddings in TensorFlow

In a Google Colab notebook, you can install TensorFlow as follows:
!pip install tensorflow
Now, let's define a transformer model in TensorFlow:
megaphone

import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.layers import Embedding, Dense

class TransformerModel(tf.keras.Model): def __init__(self, vocab_size, d_model, nhead, num_encoder_layers, num_decoder_layers, dim_feedforward, max_seq_length): super(TransformerModel, self).__init__() self.embedding = Embedding(vocab_size, d_model) self.positional_encoding = self.add_weight("positional_encoding", shape=[max_seq_length, d_model]) self.transformer = tf.keras.layers.Transformer(d_model, nhead, num_encoder_layers, num_decoder_layers, dim_feedforward) self.output_layer = Dense(vocab_size)
def call(self, src, tgt, training): src_emb = self.embedding(src) + self.positional_encoding[:tf.shape(src)[1], :] tgt_emb = self.embedding(tgt) + self.positional_encoding[:tf.shape(tgt)[1], :] output = self.transformer([src_emb, tgt_emb], training=training) output = self.output_layer(output) return output
TensorFlow's Model and Keras layers make it very convenient to define complex models such as transformers.
For training, you would use the fit method provided by Keras, or you can create a custom training loop using the GradientTape API.

info

# Assuming we have model, a dataset, and an optimizer defined for epoch in range(num_epochs): for src, tgt in dataset: with tf.GradientTape() as tape: predictions = model(src, tgt, training=True) loss = loss_function(tgt, predictions)

gradients = tape.gradient(loss, model.trainable_variables) optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, model.trainable_variables)) # Add code here for validation and printing out epoch loss ...
In this TensorFlow example, we have not explicitly defined the masks.
TensorFlow's transformer layers are designed to implicitly handle padding and look ahead mask creation.
You would need to create these masks if you want more control over the masking process.
By running these coding examples in Google Colab, students can observe the model training and actually see how word embeddings and transformers are implemented in practice.
Additional steps would involve loading data, preprocessing, and evaluation.

Let's take a closer look at the PyTorch example code for the Transformer model.

I'm going to go through each part of the TransformerModel class and the forward method.

import torch import torch.nn as nn

These lines import the necessary PyTorch modules. torch is the main PyTorch package, and torch.nn provides us with layers and utilities to build neural networks.
class TransformerModel(nn.Module):

Here, we define a class named TransformerModel that inherits from nn.Module, which is the base class for all neural network modules in PyTorch. All custom models should extend nn.Module.


def __init__(self, vocab_size, d_model, nhead, num_encoder_layers, num_decoder_layers, dim_feedforward, max_seq_length):
This line defines the constructor of our TransformerModel. It takes several important parameters:
vocab_size: The size of the vocabulary, or how many unique tokens we expect in our input.
d_model: The number of expected features in the transformer's input and output (also known as embedding dimension).
nhead: The number of attention heads in the multi-head attention models.
num_encoder_layers: The number of sub-encoder-layers in the encoder.
num_decoder_layers: The number of sub-decoder-layers in the decoder.
dim_feedforward: The dimension of the feedforward network model (often this is a larger number than d_model).
max_seq_length: The maximum length of input sequences, used for positional encodings.

super(TransformerModel, self).__init__()

This line initializes our model as a PyTorch module.
self.embedding = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, d_model)

We create an embedding layer which will learn to map tokens (integers) to high-dimensional vectors (d_model dimensions). vocab_size is the number of unique tokens that can be embedded.
self.positional_encoding = nn.Parameter(torch.zeros(max_seq_length, d_model))

This line initializes a learned parameter for positional encodings. Positional encodings are added to embeddings to give the model information about the relative or absolute position of the tokens in the sequence.
python self.transformer = nn.Transformer(d_model, nhead, num_encoder_layers, num_decoder_layers, dim_feedforward)
Here, we're creating an instance of the PyTorch transformer model according to the parameters we've passed in.

self.output_layer = nn.Linear(d_model, vocab_size) Open in:Code Editor
The output layer is a linear transformation which will map from the hidden state of the desired d_model size back to the vocabulary size, which is the output size we want (e.g., for generating probabilities of each token).
python def forward(self, src, tgt, src_mask, tgt_mask, src_padding_mask, tgt_padding_mask, memory_key_padding_mask):

Now we define the forward method, which is called when we run input data through the model.
This is where the actual processing of the input occurs.
Here's what the parameters represent:
src: Source sequence batch.
tgt: Target sequence batch. For training seq-to-seq models, this is often the target output shifted by one time step.
src_mask: The mask for source sequence batch; it's used to prevent attending to future positions.
tgt_mask: The mask for target sequence batch; similar to src_mask but also prevents the model from looking at future positions in target.
src_padding_mask: A mask to prevent the model from treating padding as part of the input.
tgt_padding_mask: A mask for padding in the target sequence batch.
memory_key_padding_mask: A mask for padding in the memory (encoder output when decoding).
python src_emb = self.embedding(src) + self.positional_encoding[:src.size(0), :] Open in:Code Editor
Here we are embedding the source sequence batch and adding positional encodings to it.
src.size(0) is used to slice the positional encoding to match the sequence length.
tgt_emb = self.embedding(tgt) + self.positional_encoding[:tgt.size(0), :] Open in:Code Editor

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.