Self-Attention Sublayer and FFN-CSDN博客

本文链接：https://blog.csdn.net/xw555666/article/details/136809233

1.Self-Attention Sublayer

In the self-attention mechanism, every input token is compared with every other token in the sequence. Each token has an associated vector (or embedding) which is used to calculate three vectors – Query (Q), Key (K), and Value (V). The attention weights are computed as the dot product between the Query and Key vectors, normalized across all tokens. Then, these attention weights are used to weight the Value vectors and produce a context-aware representation for each token. This process allows the model to consider the entire input sequence when processing each token, capturing long-range dependencies and contextual information.

The self-attention mechanism is a core component of the Transformer architecture in natural language processing (NLP). It allows each token in a sequence to attend to all other tokens and incorporate their context into its own representation. Here's a high-level overview:

Input Embeddings: Each token in the input sequence has an associated embedding vector.
Query, Key, Value: These embeddings are transformed into three separate vectors: Query (Q), Key (K), and Value (V) using learned weight matrices.
Attention Scores: The attention score for each pair of tokens is calculated as the dot product between the query and key vectors, divided by the square root of the key vector dimension (for scaling purposes). This results in a matrix of attention scores that reflect the relevance of one token to another.
Softmax: The attention scores go through a softmax function, which normalizes them across all tokens so they can be interpreted as probabilities indicating how much focus should be placed on each token when generating the new contextual representation of the current token.
Contextual Representation: For each token, its value vector is weighted by these attention probabilities and then summed up to create a new, contextually-aware representation. This process is repeated for every token in the sequence.
Multi-Head Attention: In practice, the self-attention layer often uses multiple attention heads in parallel, each with different learned weight matrices. The outputs from these heads are concatenated and linearly projected again to produce the final output of the self-attention layer.

In summary, the self-attention mechanism enables the model to understand dependencies and relationships between tokens regardless of their distance within the sequence, thereby effectively capturing long-range context without the need for sequential processing like in RNNs or CNNs.

2.Position-wise Feed-Forward Networks (FFN)

In the context of the Transformer architecture, indeed, after the self-attention mechanism processes the input sequence, each token receives a contextualized representation. This representation captures not only its own meaning but also the relationships and dependencies with other tokens in the sequence.

The enriched representations from the self-attention layers are then passed through the Position-wise Feed-Forward Networks (FFN). Each FFN is applied independently to every position (i.e., token), hence the term "position-wise." The FFN typically consists of two linear layers separated by a non-linear activation function, such as ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit).

The purpose of this feed-forward network is to further refine and transform these intermediate representations into more abstract and expressive feature vectors. It introduces additional non-linearity and complexity that can help the model to better capture higher-order patterns in the data.

This sequential process of attention followed by FFN transformation is repeated across multiple layers in the encoder or decoder stacks of the Transformer, progressively enhancing the quality of the token representations and leading to improved performance on various NLP tasks like language translation, text generation, and question answering.

3.How FFN contributes

Indeed, the feed-forward neural network (FFN) in the Transformer architecture plays a pivotal role as a refining and abstraction module. It follows the self-attention layers which have already extracted and enriched each token's representation with contextual information from the entire input sequence.

Here's how FFN contributes:

Refinement: The FFN refines these contextually rich representations by applying a series of non-linear transformations that can potentially extract deeper, more nuanced features. This refinement process is crucial because it helps to distill the most relevant aspects of the data for the specific task at hand.
Non-linearity: By incorporating non-linear activation functions like ReLU, the FFN enables the model to learn complex relationships that are not linearly separable. These non-linearities help the model capture intricate patterns within the data that might be essential for accurate predictions.
Task-relevant Features: The FFN transforms the intermediate representations into higher-level, more abstract feature vectors that are tailored towards the target task. This means that instead of merely having contextually aware embeddings, the model now has representations that encode high-level semantic or syntactic properties relevant to the particular NLP problem being solved.
Capacity Increase: Adding FFN layers also increases the expressive power of the model, allowing it to handle complex linguistic phenomena and generalize better across various contexts.

In summary, the FFN layer complements the self-attention mechanism by processing the contextual representations further, transforming them into a form that is more conducive for the final prediction step and thereby enhancing the overall performance of the Transformer model on diverse NLP tasks.

4.How FFN works

In the context of the Transformer architecture, the Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFN) is a fully connected multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that operates independently on each token's representation.

Here's a high-level description of how it works:

Input: The input to the FFN is the output from the self-attention layer, which provides a contextualized representation for each token in the sequence.
Layers: The FFN typically consists of two linear layers separated by a non-linear activation function like ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit). The first linear layer projects the input into a higher-dimensional space (d_ff), where d_ff is usually larger than the model dimension (d_model). This allows for more complex transformations and learning of higher-order features.
Non-Linearity: The ReLU activation introduces non-linearity into the model, enabling it to capture non-linear relationships within the data.
Second Linear Layer: The second linear layer then projects this higher-dimensional representation back down to the original model dimension (d_model).
Position-Wise: Each position in the sequence goes through the same set of operations, hence the term "position-wise". However, these operations are independent of other positions, meaning that the FFN processes each token separately.
Output: The output of the FFN is a new transformed representation for each token that has been subjected to non-linear transformations. These new representations can better capture complex patterns and dependencies in the data, enhancing the model's ability to understand and process language effectively.

In code form, the FFN might look similar to what was provided earlier in another response, with linear layers, an activation function, and possibly dropout regularization for preventing overfitting.

Code：

Indeed, the Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) component in the Transformer architecture is a fully connected multi-layer perceptron that applies non-linear transformations to each token's representation independently. This means that for each position in the sequence, the FFNN takes the input vector and passes it through two linear layers with a ReLU activation function in between:

class PositionWiseFeedForward(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, d_model, d_ff, dropout=0.1):
        super(PositionWiseFeedForward, self).__init__()
        self.fc1 = nn.Linear(d_model, d_ff)
        self.fc2 = nn.Linear(d_ff, d_model)
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)

    def forward(self, x):
        x = torch.relu(self.fc1(x))
        x = self.dropout(x)
        x = self.fc2(x)
        return x

In this code snippet:

d_model represents the dimensionality of the input/output vectors, which are the contextualized representations from the self-attention layer.
d_ff is the hidden layer size within the feed-forward network, often chosen to be larger than d_model, allowing for more complex feature extraction.
The ReLU activation function introduces non-linearity into the model, enabling it to capture higher-order patterns in the data.
The dropout regularization technique is applied to prevent overfitting by randomly setting a fraction of input units to 0 during training.

During the forward pass, each token's context-aware representation is processed individually by this FFN module to create an updated, potentially more abstract and informative representation.

5.Projects the input into another space

In the context of neural networks, when we say that a model "projects input into another space," it means that the model transforms the original features or representations of data points into a new and potentially more meaningful representation.

In the case of the Transformer's feed-forward neural network (FFN), after the self-attention mechanism generates an enriched representation for each token in the sequence, these representations are then passed through the FFN. The FFN consists of two linear layers separated by a non-linear activation function.

The first linear layer takes the input token embeddings (which have been updated by the attention mechanism) and multiplies them by a learned weight matrix. This operation effectively maps the tokens from their current high-dimensional space to a different high-dimensional space. The choice of this new space is determined during training as the model learns the optimal weights for representing the data in such a way that it becomes more conducive to the task at hand (e.g., language translation, text classification, etc.).

By projecting the input into another space, the FFN can extract and emphasize certain features while de-emphasizing others. It can also create entirely new features that didn't exist in the initial representation but are crucial for solving the problem. This process is often referred to as feature learning or representation learning because the model learns what aspects of the input data are most important and how to best represent them for achieving good performance on the target task.

6. Transformer

The Transformer model consists of two main components in each layer: the Self-Attention Sublayer and the Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFN). These sublayers are followed by normalization and residual connections to improve training stability and performance.

Input token	self-attention sublayer	FFN
an associated vector (or embedding)	a context-aware representation for each token	a new transformed representation for each token(more abstract and informative)

**Self-Attention Sublayer:**
In the self-attention mechanism, every input token is compared with every other token in the sequence. Each token has an associated vector (or embedding) which is used to calculate three vectors – Query (Q), Key (K), and Value (V). The attention weights are computed as the dot product between the Query and Key vectors, normalized across all tokens. Then, these attention weights are used to weight the Value vectors and produce a context-aware representation for each token. This process allows the model to consider the entire input sequence when processing each token, capturing long-range dependencies and contextual information.

**Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFN):**
After the self-attention step, the output goes through a feed-forward neural network. This part of the architecture is a fully connected multi-layer perceptron that applies a non-linear transformation to each token's representation independently. It usually consists of two linear layers with a ReLU activation function in between. The FFN adds complexity and modeling capacity to the system, allowing it to learn more sophisticated relationships within the data.

Each FFN operates on individual tokens from the output of the self-attention sublayer, but it does so in parallel across all tokens, hence preserving the efficiency advantage of the Transformer over sequential models like RNNs.

Both the Self-Attention Sublayer and the Feed-Forward Neural Network contribute to making the Transformer architecture powerful and adaptable, especially for understanding and generating human language.

7. Cleverly designed attention mechanisms

Cleverly designed attention mechanisms indeed play a pivotal role in capturing complex relationships among input and output tokens in various deep learning models, particularly those based on Transformers such as the original Transformer architecture proposed by Vaswani et al., or advanced versions like BERT, GPT, and many others.

The attention mechanism allows every token in the input sequence to attend to all other tokens when computing its representation. This self-attention process enables the model to identify and learn dependencies and relationships regardless of distance, unlike recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which suffer from limited receptive fields or sequential processing constraints.

Here's how it works:

Query-Key-Value Pairs: Each token is represented by three vectors: a query vector, a key vector, and a value vector. The query of one token compares with all keys to calculate attention scores, which reflect the relationship strength between tokens.
Softmax Function: These attention scores go through a softmax function, normalizing them so that they add up to 1 and can be interpreted as probabilities. Tokens with higher attention scores will have more influence on the output.
Weighted Sum of Values: The output representation for each token is a weighted sum of all value vectors, where the weights are the attention scores computed earlier. This ensures that each token's representation incorporates information from across the entire sequence according to learned relationships.

By arranging these attention mechanisms in multiple layers and/or heads, the model can capture diverse and intricate relationships, including long-range dependencies, syntactic structures, semantic meanings, and even common sense knowledge. This arrangement leads to powerful models capable of handling a wide range of NLP tasks effectively and efficiently.