Transformer BOS token when breaking sequence into sub-sequences - deep-learning

I need to apply a Transformer to a task where sequences can be much longer than the time dependency between timesteps.
For example, a sequence might be 1000 tokens long, but to predict x[i+1] only x[i-50] to x[i] are necessary. This induces me to train the transformer by breaking each sequence of 1000 tokens into 20 sequences of 50 steps each, which would be more efficient.
How should I deal with the BOS (beginning-of-sentence) token that shifts targets right? Should I use it in each subsequence, or should I instead use the token that comes immediately before the beginning of each subsequence?
For example, given a subsequence x[50:100], should the targets be [BOS, x[50], x[51], ... x[100]] or should they be [x[49], x[50], x[51], ... x[100]]?

Related

1D Sequence Classification

I am working with a long sequence (~60 000 timesteps) classification task with continuous input domain. The input has the shape (B, L, C) where B is the batch size, L is the sequence length (i.e. timesteps) and C is the number of features where each feature is continuous (i.e. values like 0.6, 0.2, 0.5, 1.3, etc.).
Since the sequence is very long, I can't directly apply an RNN or Transformer Encoder layer without exceeding memory limits. Some proposed methods use several CNN layers to "downsample" the sequence length before feeding it into an RNN model. A successful example of this includes the CNN-LSTM model. By introducing several subsequent Convolutional blocks followed by max-pooling it is possible to "downsample" the sequence length by a given factor. The sampled sequence would instead have a sequence length of 60 timesteps for instance, which is much more manageable for an LSTM model.
Does it make sense to directly substitute the LSTM model with a Transformer encoder? I have read that the transformer attention mechanism can complement the LSTM layers and be used in succession.
There also exist many variants of Transformers and other architectures designed for handling long sequences. Latest examples include Performer, Linformer, Reformer, Nyströmformer, BigBird, FNet, S4, CDIL-CNN. Does there exist a library similar to torchvision for implementing these models in pytorch without copy-pasting large amounts of code from the respective repositories?

Encoder number of outpus for opcode within a MIPS machine instruction

If I have an encoder with 8 data inputs, what is its maximum number of outputs?
I know that an encoder is a combinational circuit that performs the reverse operation of a decoder. It has a maximum of 2^n input lines and ‘n’ output lines, hence it encodes the information from 2^n inputs into an n-bit code. Since I have 8 data input, the output will be 3, since 2^3 = 8. Is that the correct assumption?
Let's try to tease apart the concepts of one hot (decoded) lines and an encoding using a number of bits.  Both these concepts are a way to represent information, but their form and typical usage is different.
One hot is a technique wherein at most one line is 1/true and all the other lines are 0/false.  These one hot lines are not considered digits in a number, but rather individual signals or conditions (only one of which is can be true at any given time).  This form is particularly useful in certain circuits, as each of the one hot lines can activate some other hardware.  (A hardware lookup table (LUT), a RAM or ROM may use one-hot within its internal array indexing.)
Encoding is a technique where we use N lines as digits in an N-bit number, as would be found in a CPU register holding a number, or as we might write normal binary numbers in text.  By contrast, in this form any of the N bits can be 1 (or 0).
Simple encoders & decoders translate between encoded form (N-bit numbers) and one hot form (2N lines).
... encoder ... has a maximum of 2^n input lines and ‘n’ output lines
In your statement, the 2^n input lines are in one hot form, while the output lines are normal numbers in binary (i.e. encoded).
Both the inputs (2^n lines) and the outputs (n lines) are capable of representing exactly 2^n different values!  As a result, decode/encode is a 1:1 mapping, back & forth.  (It would be an error to have multiple hots on the input side of such a decoder, and bad things would happen in a system that allowed that.)
In the formulas you're speaking to:  2N = V,  and   N = log2 ( V )  —  N stands for number of bits (a bit is a binary digit), and V stands for number of values that can be represented in N bits.
(While the 2's in these formulas are for binary — substitute 2 with 10 for the same relationships for number of decimal digits vs. number of values those number of digits can represent/store/communicate).
In one hot form we need V number of lines, whereas in encoded form we need N lines (as bits/digits) to represent the same information (one of V different values).
Consider whether a number you're looking is a digit count (as with N) or a value count (as with V).
And bear in mind that in one hot form, we need one line for each possible value, V (whereas in encoded form we need N bits for V possible values).
A MIPS processor will feed the 6 bit opcode field into a lookup table of some sort, in order to determine which set of control signals to activate for any given instruction.  (The opcode field is not one hot, but rather a bit field of N=6 bits).
These control signals are (also) not one hot, and the MIPS instruction decoder is not using a simple decoder, but rather a mapper that goes between encoded opcode values and effectively encoded control signals — this mapping is accomplished by lookup in a table.
These control signals are individual boolean values rather than as a set either one-hot or an encoded number.  One hot may be used internally in indexing of this mapping.  This mapping is basically an array lookup where the index is the opcode and each array element has all the individual control signal values appropriate its index.
(R-Type instructions all share a common opcode value, so when the R-Type opcode value is present, then additional lookup/mapping is done on the func bit field to generate the proper control signals.)

Speeding up Beam Search with seq2seq

I have a fully working seq2seq attention model with beam search and it does give improved results. But it takes > 1min for inferencing (batch-size 1024) with k=5 (k is my hypotheses) because none of it is parallelised. Everything happens 1 sample at a time.
Task (simplified)
Goal is sentence translation, 15 words Lang A to 15 words Lang B.
Encoder is a RNN that takes in 15 word sentence and encodes a representation of it, gives out a [timestep, 512] matrix along with final hidden state.
Decoder is another RNN, takes encoder hidden state as initial state, uses [timestep, 512] matrix for attention and outputs translated words[batches] one timestep at a time. Naturally, there is some form of parallelization till this point.
During inference stage, beam search is used. At each timestep of the decoder, rather than taking the predicted word with highest prob, I take k best words. And provide k words as input to the next timestep so that it can predict the next word in the sentence (rest of the algorithm is given below). Algorithm makes decoding less greedy anticipating results with higher total probability in succeeding timesteps.
for each element in the test-set
calculate initial k (decoder-encoder step)
for range(timesteps-1)
for each prev k
get hidden state
obtain its best k
save hidden state
find new k from k*k possible ones
##update hypotheses based on new found k
for element in k
copy hidden state
change hypotheses if necessary
append new k to hypotheses
There are 6 tensors and 2 lists to keep track and handle state changes. Is there any room for speedup or parallelisation here? perhaps each k can go through enncode-decode simultaneously? Any help is much appreciated.

How to massage inputs into Keras framework?

I am new to keras and despite reading the documentation and the examples folder in keras, I'm still struggling with how to fit everything together.
In particular, I want to start with a simple task: I have a sequence of tokens, where each token has exactly one label. I have a lot training data like this - practically infinite, as I can generate more (token, label) training pairs as needed.
I want to build a network to predict labels given tokens. The number of tokens must always be the same as the number of labels (one token = one label).
And I want this to be based on all surrounding tokens, say within the same line or sentence or window -- not just on the preceding tokens.
How far I got on my own:
created the training numpy vectors, where I converted each sentence into a token-vector and label-vector (of same length), using a token-to-int and label-to-int mappings
wrote a model using categorical_crossentropy and one LSTM layer, based on https://github.com/fchollet/keras/blob/master/examples/lstm_text_generation.py.
Now struggling with:
All the input_dim and input_shape parameters... since each sentence has a different length (different number of tokens and labels in it), what should I put as input_dim for the input layer?
How to tell the network to use the entire token sentence for prediction, not just one token? How to predict a whole sequence of labels given a sequence of tokens, rather than just label based on previous tokens?
Does splitting the text into sentences or windows make any sense? Or can I just pass a vector for the entire text as a single sequence? What is a "sequence"?
What are "time slices" and "time steps"? The documentation keeps mentioning that and I have no idea how that relates to my problem. What is "time" in keras?
Basically I have trouble connecting the concepts from the documentation like "time" or "sequence" to my problem. Issues like Keras#40 didn't make me any wiser.
Pointing to relevant examples on the web or code samples would be much appreciated. Not looking for academic articles.
Thanks!
If you have sequences of different length you can either pad them or use a stateful RNN implementation in which the activations are saved between batches. The former is the easiest and most used.
If you want to use future information when using RNNs you want to use a bidirectional model where you concatenate two RNN's moving in opposite directions. RNN will use a representation of all previous information when e.g. predicting.
If you have very long sentences it might be useful to sample a random sub-sequence and train on that. Fx 100 characters. This also helps with overfitting.
Time steps are your tokens. A sentence is a sequence of characters/tokens.
I've written an example of how I understand your problem but it's not tested so it might not run. Instead of using integers to represent your data I suggest one-hot encoding if it is possible and then use binary_crossentropy instead of mse.
from keras.models import Model
from keras.layers import Input, LSTM, TimeDistributed
from keras.preprocessing import sequence
# Make sure all sequences are of same length
X_train = sequence.pad_sequences(X_train, maxlen=maxlen)
# The input shape is your sequence length and your token embedding size (which is 1)
inputs = Input(shape=(maxlen, 1))
# Build a bidirectional RNN
lstm_forward = LSTM(128)(inputs)
lstm_backward = LSTM(128, go_backwards=True)(inputs)
bidirectional_lstm = merge([lstm_forward, lstm_backward], mode='concat', concat_axis=2)
# Output each timestep into a fully connected layer with linear
# output to map to an integer
sequence_output = TimeDistributed(Dense(1, activation='linear'))(bidirectional_lstm)
# Dense(n_classes, activation='sigmoid') if you want to classify
model = Model(inputs, sequence_output)
model.compile('adam', 'mse')
model.fit(X_train, y_train)

Compressing a binary matrix

We were asked to find a way to compress a square binary matrix as much as possible, and if possible, to add redundancy bits to check and maybe correct errors.
The redundancy thing is easy to implement in my opinion. The complicated part is compressing the matrix. I thought about using run-length after reshaping the matrix to a vector because there will be more zeros than ones, but I only achieved a 40bits compression (we are working on small sizes) although I thought it'd be better.
Also, after run-length an idea was Huffman coding the matrix, but a dictionary must be sent in order to recover the original information.
I'd like to know what would be the best way to compress a binary matrix?
After reading some comments, yes #Adam you're right, the 14x14 matrix should be compressed in 128bits, so if I only use the coordinates (rows&cols) for each non-zero element, still it would be 160bits (since there are twenty ones). I'm not looking for an exact solution but for a useful idea.
You can only talk about compressing something if you have a distribution and a representation. That's the issue of the dictionary you have to send along: you always need some sort of dictionary of protocol to uncompress something. It just so happens that things like .zip and .mpeg already have those dictionaries/codecs. Even something as simple as Huffman-encoding is an algorithm; on the other side of the communication channel (you can think of compression as communication), the other person already has a bit of code (the dictionary) to perform the Huffman decompression scheme.
Thus you cannot even begin to talk about compressing something without first thinking "what kinds of matrices do I expect to see?", "is the data truly random, or is there order?", and if so "how can I represent the matrices to take advantage of order in the data?".
You cannot compress some matrices without increasing the size of other objects (by at least 1 bit). This is bad news if all matrices are equally probable, and you care equally about them all.
Addenda:
The answer to use sparse matrix machinery is not necessarily the right answer. The matrix could for example be represented in python as [[(r+c)%2 for c in range (cols)] for r in range(rows)] (a checkerboard pattern), and a sparse matrix wouldn't compress it at all, but the Kolmogorov complexity of the matrix is the above program's length.
Well, I know every matrix will have the same number of ones, so this is kind of deterministic. The only think I don't know is where the 1's will be. Also, if I transmit the matrix with a dictionary and there are burst errors, maybe the dictionary gets affected so... wouldnt be the resulting information corrupted? That's why I was trying to use lossless data compression such as run-length, the decoder just doesnt need a dictionary. --original poster
How many 1s does the matrix have as a fraction of its size, and what is its size (NxN -- what is N)?
Furthermore, this is an incorrect assertion and should not be used as a reason to desire run-length encoding (which still requires a program); when you transmit data over a channel, you can always add error-correction to this data. "Data" is just a blob of bits. You can transmit both the data and any required dictionaries over the channel. The error-correcting machinery does not care at all what the bits you transmit are for.
Addendum 2:
There are (14*14) choose 20 possible arrangements, which I assume are randomly chosen. If this number was larger than 128^2 what you're trying to do would be impossible. Fortunately log_2((14*14) choose 20) ~= 90bits < 128bits so it's possible.
The simple solution of writing down 20 numbers like 32,2,67,175,52,...,168 won't work because log_2(14*14)*20 ~= 153bits > 128bits. This would be equivalent to run-length encoding. We want to do something like this but we are on a very strict budget and cannot afford to be "wasteful" with bits.
Because you care about each possibility equally, your "dictionary"/"program" will simulate a giant lookup table. Matlab's sparse matrix implementation may work but is not guaranteed to work and is thus not a correct solution.
If you can create a bijection between the number range [0,2^128) and subsets of size 20, you're good to go. This corresponds to enumerating ways to descend the pyramid in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_coefficient to the 20th element of row 196. This is the same as enumerating all "k-combinations". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination#Enumerating_k-combinations
Fortunately I know that Mathematica and Sage and other CAS software can apparently generate the "5th" or "12th" or arbitrarily numbered k-subset. Looking through their documentation, we come upon a function called "rank", e.g. http://www.sagemath.org/doc/reference/sage/combinat/subset.html
So then we do some more searching, and come across some arcane Fortran code like http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/m_src/subset/ksub_rank.m and http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/m_src/subset/ksub_unrank.m
We could reverse-engineer it, but it's kind of dense. But now we have enough information to search for k-subset rank unrank, which leads us to http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~lucia/courses/5165-09/GenCombObj.pdf -- see the section
"Generating k-subsets (of an n-set): Lexicographical
Ordering" and the rank and unrank algorithms on the next few pages.
In order to achieve the exact theoretically optimal compression, in the case of a uniformly random distribution of 1s, we must thus use this technique to biject our matrices to our output number of range <2^128. It just so happens that combinations have a natural ordering, known as ranking and unranking of combinations. You assign a number to each combination (ranking), and if you know the number you automatically know the combination (unranking). Googling k-subset rank unrank will probably yield other algorithms.
Thus your solution would look like this:
serialize the matrix into a list
e.g. [[0,0,1][0,1,1][1,0,0]] -> [0,0,1,0,1,1,1,0,0]
take the indices of the 1s:
e.g. [0,0,1,0,1,1,1,0,0] -> [3,5,6,7]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a k=4-subset of an n=9 set
take the rank
e.g. compressed = rank([3,5,6,7], n=9)
compressed==412 (or something, I made that up)
you're done!
e.g. 412 -binary-> 110011100 (at most n=9bits, less than 2^n=2^9=512)
to uncompress, unrank it
I'll get to 128 bits in a sec, first here's how you fit a 14x14 boolean matrix with exactly 20 nonzeros into 136 bits. It's based on the CSC sparse matrix format.
You have an array c with 14 4-bit counters that tell you how many nonzeros are in each column.
You have another array r with 20 4-bit row indices.
56 bits (c) + 80 bits (r) = 136 bits.
Let's squeeze 8 bits out of c:
Instead of 4-bit counters, use 2-bit. c is now 2*14 = 28 bits, but can't support more than 3 nonzeros per column. This leaves us with 128-80-28 = 20 bits. Use that space for array a4c with 5 4-bit elements that "add 4 to an element of c" specified by the 4-bit element. So, if a4c={2,2,10,15, 15} that means c[2] += 4; c[2] += 4 (again); c[10] += 4;.
The "most wasteful" distribution of nonzeros is one where the column count will require an add-4 to support 1 extra nonzero: so 5 columns with 4 nonzeros each. Luckily we have exactly 5 add-4s available.
Total space = 28 bits (c) + 20 bits
(a4c) + 80 bits (r) = 128 bits.
Your input is a perfect candidate for a sparse matrix. You said you're using Matlab, so you already have a good sparse matrix built for you.
spm = sparse(dense_matrix)
Matlab's sparse matrix implementation uses Compressed Sparse Columns, which has memory usage on the order of 2*(# of nonzeros) + (# of columns), which should be pretty good in your case of 20 nonzeros and 14 columns. Storing 20 values sure is better than storing 196...
Also remember that all matrices in Matlab are going to be composed of doubles. Just because your matrix can be stored as a 1-bit boolean doesn't mean Matlab won't stick it into a 64-bit floating point value... If you do need it as a boolean you're going to have to make your own type in C and use .mex files to interface with Matlab.
After thinking about this again, if all your matrices are going to be this small and they're all binary, then just store them as a binary vector (bitmask). Going off your 14x14 example, that requires 196 bits or 25 bytes (plus n, m if your dimensions are not constant). That same vector in Matlab would use 64 bits per element, or 1568 bytes. So storing the matrix as a bitmask takes as much space as 4 elements of the original matrix in Matlab, for a compression ratio of 62x.
Unfortunately I don't know if Matlab supports bitmasks natively or if you have to resort to .mex files. If you do get into C++ you can use STL's vector<bool> which implements a bitmask for you.