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Encoder_Decoder_Transformers_Notes

The document discusses the Encoder-Decoder architecture used in sequence-to-sequence tasks, highlighting its components and limitations. It contrasts this with Transformers, which utilize attention mechanisms for improved efficiency and performance in modeling sequences. Key differences between the two architectures are outlined, emphasizing the advantages of Transformers in handling long-range dependencies and parallel processing.

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12 views6 pages

Encoder_Decoder_Transformers_Notes

The document discusses the Encoder-Decoder architecture used in sequence-to-sequence tasks, highlighting its components and limitations. It contrasts this with Transformers, which utilize attention mechanisms for improved efficiency and performance in modeling sequences. Key differences between the two architectures are outlined, emphasizing the advantages of Transformers in handling long-range dependencies and parallel processing.

Uploaded by

khushirajpurohit617
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# Detailed Notes on Encoder, Decoder, and Transformers

## 1. Encoder-Decoder Architecture

### Overview

The Encoder-Decoder architecture is a fundamental framework used in sequence-to-sequence

(seq2seq) tasks. It is widely employed in applications such as machine translation, text

summarization, and speech-to-text systems.

### Key Components

1. **Encoder**:

- The encoder processes the input sequence and converts it into a fixed-length context vector

(latent representation).

- It captures the essential features of the input sequence.

- In RNN-based architectures, it typically consists of multiple RNN, LSTM, or GRU layers.

2. **Decoder**:

- The decoder generates the output sequence step by step, using the context vector from the

encoder and its previous outputs.

- It predicts the next token based on the current state and the context vector.

### Workflow

1. The encoder processes the input sequence \( x = \{x_1, x_2, \dots, x_n\} \) and produces a

context vector \( C \):

\[

h_t = f(x_t, h_{t-1})


\]

where \( h_t \) is the hidden state at time \( t \).

2. The decoder takes \( C \) and generates the output sequence \( y = \{y_1, y_2, \dots, y_m\} \):

\[

s_t = g(y_{t-1}, s_{t-1}, C)

\]

\[

P(y_t | y_{<t}, C) = \text{softmax}(W_s s_t + b_s)

\]

### Limitations

- Fixed-length context vectors can struggle to capture all the essential details of long input

sequences.

- Sequential processing can lead to inefficiencies, especially for long sequences.

---

## 2. Transformers

### Overview

Transformers revolutionized deep learning for sequence-to-sequence tasks by introducing a

non-sequential architecture based entirely on attention mechanisms. They overcome the limitations

of RNN-based encoder-decoder models.

### Key Concepts

1. **Self-Attention Mechanism**:
- Allows the model to weigh the importance of different parts of the sequence when encoding each

token.

- Formula for scaled dot-product attention:

\[

\text{Attention}(Q, K, V) = \text{softmax}\left(\frac{QK^T}{\sqrt{d_k}}\right)V

\]

where \( Q \), \( K \), and \( V \) are query, key, and value matrices, respectively.

2. **Multi-Head Attention**:

- Splits attention into multiple heads to capture different types of relationships in the data.

- Formula:

\[

\text{MultiHead}(Q, K, V) = \text{Concat}(\text{head}_1, \dots, \text{head}_h)W^O

\]

3. **Positional Encoding**:

- Since Transformers process tokens in parallel, positional encodings are added to input

embeddings to provide information about token order.

- Formula:

\[

PE(pos, 2i) = \sin(pos / 10000^{2i/d_{model}})

\]

\[

PE(pos, 2i+1) = \cos(pos / 10000^{2i/d_{model}})

\]

### Architecture
1. **Encoder**:

- Consists of multiple layers of:

- Multi-head self-attention

- Feedforward neural networks

- Layer normalization and residual connections

2. **Decoder**:

- Similar to the encoder but includes an additional cross-attention mechanism to attend to the

encoder's output.

### Advantages

- Parallel processing significantly reduces training time.

- Attention mechanisms capture long-range dependencies effectively.

---

## 3. Differences Between Encoder-Decoder and Transformers

| Feature | Encoder-Decoder (RNN/LSTM) | Transformers |

|-----------------------------|-----------------------------|-------------------------------|

| **Architecture** | Sequential processing | Parallel processing |

| **Context Representation** | Fixed-length vector | Attention-based |

| **Efficiency** | Slower for long sequences | Faster due to parallelism |

| **Dependency Modeling** | Limited long-term modeling | Captures long-range dependencies |

| **Applications** | Traditional seq2seq tasks | NLP, vision, multi-modal tasks |

---
## 4. Illustration

### Encoder-Decoder Architecture

- Input Sequence: \( x_1, x_2, x_3 \)

- Encoder: Generates a fixed context vector \( C \)

- Decoder: Outputs \( y_1, y_2, y_3 \)

```

Input -> [Encoder] -> Context Vector -> [Decoder] -> Output

```

### Transformer Architecture

- Input Sequence: \( x_1, x_2, x_3 \)

- Attention Mechanism: Captures relationships between all tokens

- Positional Encoding: Adds token order information

- Output Sequence: \( y_1, y_2, y_3 \)

```

Input -> [Multi-Head Attention] -> [Feedforward Layer] -> Output

```

---

## Key Takeaways

- The Encoder-Decoder framework is foundational for seq2seq tasks but struggles with long

sequences due to fixed-length context vectors.


- Transformers revolutionized sequence modeling with attention mechanisms and parallel

processing, enabling state-of-the-art performance across NLP and beyond.

- The choice between these architectures depends on the task, with Transformers being the go-to

choice for most modern applications.

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