# Transformers Introduction

## Transformers

Transformers are models which use attention to speed up training. While other models use attention, transformers discard the recurrent and convolution used in other architectures.

## Self-attention

Turn every word into a linear combination of each words’ value vector ($V$). The weights in the linear combination come inner products of word pairs’ query vector ($Q$) and key vector ($K$). These three matrices $Q, K, V$ are parameters learned during training.

1. Compute three vectors from X, whose rows are word vectors, like word2vec:
• Query: $X W^Q = Q$
• Key: $X W^K = K$
• Value: $X W^V = V$
• These three vectors are all N-by-$d_k$, where $N$=number of words.
2. Calculate a score for each input word with all other words.
• Dot product of the word’s query vector with the other word’s key vector.
• $Q K^T$
3. Normalize by the dimension of the key vector:
• $\frac{Q K^T}{\sqrt{d_K}}$
4. Apply softmax to rows so each words’ scores are positive and sum to 1.
• $softmax(\frac{Q K^T}{\sqrt{d_K}})$
5. For each word, take a linear combination of the words (rows in the value matrix V). Words that have higher weights from the softmax will receive more weight:
• $Z = softmax(\frac{Q K^T}{\sqrt{d_K}}) V$
• Each row of the new matrix is a weighted sum of the rows of V. This is because left-multiplicaiton of matrices is a linear combination or rows.
• The left matrix forces the V matrix to focus on certain words and not others.

The resulting matrix $Z$ has for each word a weight sum of the words’ values from $V$, where the weights are computed using inner products from $Q$ and $K$.

Now let’s use mutiple sets of Query/Key/Value matrices, one for each head.

• Before: $(W^Q, W^K, W^V)$
• After: ${(W_0^Q, W_0^K, W_0^V),..,(W_7^Q, W_7^K, W_7^V)}$

That gives us eight different $Z$ matrics:

• $Z_0,…,Z_7$

Now, concatenate all the matrices, and multiply by an additional weights matrix $W^0 (8d_k \times d_W )$.

• $Z_c=[Z_0,…,Z_8] \ (N \times 8d_k))$
• $Z = Z_cW^0$

This output We can summarize the calculation as follows.

$$Z = Z_c W^0 = [Z_1,…,Z_7]$$

where

$$Z_i = softmax(\frac{Q_i K_i^T}{\sqrt{d_k}}) V_i$$

The weight matrices $(W_i^Q, W_i^K, W_i^V)$ are initialized randomly and learned during training. They project input embeddings into different representation subspaces.

### References

##### Robert Hatem
###### Data Scientist

Data scientist interested in machine learning and natural language processing.