GPT-2 from scratch with torch

No matter your tackle Giant Language Fashions (LLMs) – are they useful? harmful? a short-lived vogue, like crypto? – they’re right here, now. And meaning, it’s a good factor to know (at a degree one must determine for oneself) how they work. On this similar day, I’m publishing What are Large Language Models? What are they not?, supposed for a extra common viewers. On this put up, I’d like to handle deep studying practitioners, strolling by a torch implementation of GPT-2 (Radford et al. 2019), the second in OpenAI’s succession of ever-larger fashions educated on ever-more-vast textual content corpora. You’ll see {that a} full mannequin implementation matches in fewer than 250 traces of R code.

Sources, assets

The code I’m going to current is discovered within the minhub repository. This repository deserves a point out of its personal. As emphasised within the README,

minhub is a set of minimal implementations of deep studying fashions, impressed by minGPT. All fashions are designed to be self-contained, single-file, and devoid of exterior dependencies, making them simple to repeat and combine into your personal initiatives.

Evidently, this makes them wonderful studying materials; however that’s not all. Fashions additionally include the choice to load pre-trained weights from Hugging Face’s model hub. And if that weren’t enormously handy already, you don’t have to fret about the way to get tokenization proper: Simply obtain the matching tokenizer from Hugging Face, as nicely. I’ll present how this works within the final section of this put up. As famous within the minhub README, these services are supplied by packages hfhub and tok.

As realized in minhub, gpt2.R is, largely, a port of Karpathy’s MinGPT. Hugging Face’s (extra refined) implementation has additionally been consulted. For a Python code walk-through, see https://amaarora.github.io/posts/2020-02-18-annotatedGPT2.html. This textual content additionally consolidates hyperlinks to weblog posts and studying supplies on language modeling with deep studying which have develop into “classics” within the quick time since they had been written.

A minimal GPT-2

General structure

The unique Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017) was constructed up of each an encoder and a decoder stack, a prototypical use case being machine translation. Subsequent developments, depending on envisaged main utilization, tended to forego one of many stacks. The primary GPT, which differs from GPT-2 solely in relative subtleties, saved solely the decoder stack. With “self-attention” wired into each decoder block, in addition to an preliminary embedding step, this isn’t an issue – exterior enter will not be technically completely different from successive inner representations.

Here’s a screenshot from the preliminary GPT paper (Radford and Narasimhan 2018), visualizing the general structure. It’s nonetheless legitimate for GPT-2. Token in addition to place embedding are adopted by a twelve-fold repetition of (similar in construction, although not sharing weights) transformer blocks, with a task-dependent linear layer constituting mannequin output.

In gpt2.R, this world construction and what it does is outlined in nn_gpt2_model(). (The code is extra modularized – so don’t be confused if code and screenshot don’t completely match.)

First, in initialize(), we’ve the definition of modules:

self$transformer <- nn_module_dict(list(
  wte = nn_embedding(vocab_size, n_embd),
  wpe = nn_embedding(max_pos, n_embd),
  drop = nn_dropout(pdrop),
  h = nn_sequential(!!!map(
    1:n_layer,
    (x) nn_gpt2_transformer_block(n_embd, n_head, n_layer, max_pos, pdrop)
  )),
  ln_f = nn_layer_norm(n_embd, eps = 1e-5)
))

self$lm_head <- nn_linear(n_embd, vocab_size, bias = FALSE)

The 2 top-level elements on this mannequin are the transformer and lm_head, the output layer. This code-level distinction has an essential semantic dimension, with two facets standing out. First, and fairly straight, transformer’s definition communicates, in a succinct manner, what it’s that constitutes a Transformer. What comes thereafter – lm_head, in our case – might fluctuate. Second, and importantly, the excellence displays the important underlying concept, or important operationalization, of pure language processing in deep studying. Studying consists of two steps, the primary – and indispensable one – being to study language (that is what LLMs do), and the second, a lot much less resource-consuming, one consisting of adaptation to a concrete job (reminiscent of query answering, or textual content summarization).

To see in what order (and the way usually) issues occur, we glance inside ahead():

tok_emb <- self$transformer$wte(x) 
pos <- torch_arange(1, x$dimension(2))$to(dtype = "lengthy")$unsqueeze(1) 
pos_emb <- self$transformer$wpe(pos)
x <- self$transformer$drop(tok_emb + pos_emb)
x <- self$transformer$h(x)
x <- self$transformer$ln_f(x)
x <- self$lm_head(x)
x

All modules in transformer are referred to as, and thus executed, as soon as; this contains h – however h itself is a sequential module made up of transformer blocks.

Since these blocks are the core of the mannequin, we’ll have a look at them subsequent.

Transformer block

Right here’s how, in nn_gpt2_transformer_block(), every of the twelve blocks is outlined.

self$ln_1 <- nn_layer_norm(n_embd, eps = 1e-5)
self$attn <- nn_gpt2_attention(n_embd, n_head, n_layer, max_pos, pdrop)
self$ln_2 <- nn_layer_norm(n_embd, eps = 1e-5)
self$mlp <- nn_gpt2_mlp(n_embd, pdrop)

On this degree of decision, we see that self-attention is computed afresh at each stage, and that the opposite constitutive ingredient is a feed-forward neural community. As well as, there are two modules computing layer normalization, the kind of normalization employed in transformer blocks. Completely different normalization algorithms have a tendency to tell apart themselves from each other in what they common over; layer normalization (Ba, Kiros, and Hinton 2016) – surprisingly, perhaps, to some readers – does so per batch merchandise. That’s, there’s one imply, and one normal deviation, for every unit in a module. All different dimensions (in a picture, that may be spatial dimensions in addition to channels) represent the enter to that item-wise statistics computation.

Persevering with to zoom in, we are going to have a look at each the attention- and the feed-forward community shortly. Earlier than, although, we have to see how these layers are referred to as. Right here is all that occurs in ahead():

x <- x + self$attn(self$ln_1(x))
x + self$mlp(self$ln_2(x))

These two traces should be learn attentively. Versus simply calling every consecutive layer on the earlier one’s output, this inserts skip (additionally termed residual) connections that, every, circumvent one of many mother or father module’s principal levels. The impact is that every sub-module doesn’t change, however simply replace what’s handed in with its personal view on issues.

Transformer block up shut: Self-attention

Of all modules in GPT-2, that is by far essentially the most intimidating-looking. However the primary algorithm employed right here is similar as what the traditional “dot product consideration paper” (Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio 2014) proposed in 2014: Consideration is conceptualized as similarity, and similarity is measured by way of the dot product. One factor that may be complicated is the “self” in self-attention. This time period first appeared within the Transformer paper (Vaswani et al. 2017), which had an encoder in addition to a decoder stack. There, “consideration” referred to how the decoder blocks determined the place to focus within the message acquired from the encoding stage, whereas “self-attention” was the time period coined for this system being utilized contained in the stacks themselves (i.e., between a stack’s inner blocks). With GPT-2, solely the (now redundantly-named) self-attention stays.

Resuming from the above, there are two the explanation why this would possibly look sophisticated. For one, the “triplication” of tokens launched, in Transformer, by the “question – key – worth” body. And secondly, the extra batching launched by having not only one, however a number of, parallel, impartial attention-calculating processes per layer (“multi-head consideration”). Strolling by the code, I’ll level to each as they make their look.

We once more begin with module initialization. That is how nn_gpt2_attention() lists its elements:

# key, question, worth projections for all heads, however in a batch
self$c_attn <- nn_linear(n_embd, 3 * n_embd)
# output projection
self$c_proj <- nn_linear(n_embd, n_embd)

# regularization
self$attn_dropout <- nn_dropout(pdrop)
self$resid_dropout <- nn_dropout(pdrop)

# causal masks to make sure that consideration is simply utilized to the left within the enter sequence
self$bias <- torch_ones(max_pos, max_pos)$
  bool()$
  tril()$
  view(c(1, 1, max_pos, max_pos)) |>
  nn_buffer()

In addition to two dropout layers, we see:

• A linear module that effectuates the above-mentioned triplication. Be aware how that is completely different from simply having three similar variations of a token: Assuming all representations had been initially largely equal (by random initialization, for instance), they won’t stay so as soon as we’ve begun to coach the mannequin.
• A module, referred to as c_proj, that applies a closing affine transformation. We might want to have a look at utilization to see what this module is for.
• A buffer – a tensor that’s a part of a module’s state, however exempt from coaching – that makes positive that spotlight will not be utilized to previous-block output that “lies sooner or later.” Principally, that is achieved by masking out future tokens, making use of a lower-triangular matrix.

As to ahead(), I’m splitting it up into easy-to-digest items.

As we enter the tactic, the argument, x, is formed simply as anticipated, for a language mannequin: batch dimension instances sequence size instances embedding dimension.

x$form
[1]   1  24 768

Subsequent, two batching operations occur: (1) triplication into queries, keys, and values; and (2) making house such that spotlight may be computed for the specified variety of consideration heads abruptly. I’ll clarify how after itemizing the entire piece.

# batch dimension, sequence size, embedding dimensionality (n_embd)
c(b, t, c) %<-% x$form

# calculate question, key, values for all heads in batch and transfer head ahead to be the batch dim
c(q, ok, v) %<-% ((self$c_attn(x)$
  break up(self$n_embd, dim = -1)) |>
  map((x) x$view(c(b, t, self$n_head, c / self$n_head))) |>
  map((x) x$transpose(2, 3)))

First, the decision to self$c_attn() yields question, key, and worth vectors for every embedded enter token. break up() separates the ensuing matrix into a listing. Then map() takes care of the second batching operation. All the three matrices are re-shaped, including a fourth dimension. This fourth dimension takes care of the eye heads. Be aware how, versus the multiplying course of that triplicated the embeddings, this divides up what we’ve among the many heads, leaving every of them to work with a subset inversely proportional to the variety of heads used. Lastly, map((x) x$transpose(2, 3) mutually exchanges head and sequence-position dimensions.

Subsequent comes the computation of consideration itself.

# causal self-attention; Self-attend: (B, nh, T, hs) x (B, nh, hs, T) -> (B, nh, T, T)
att <- q$matmul(ok$transpose(-2, -1)) * (1 / sqrt(ok$dimension(-1)))
att <- att$masked_fill(self$bias[, , 1:t, 1:t] == 0, -Inf)
att <- att$softmax(dim = -1)
att <- self$attn_dropout(att)

First, similarity between queries and keys is computed, matrix multiplication successfully being a batched dot product. (In case you’re questioning in regards to the closing division time period in line one, this scaling operation is without doubt one of the few facets the place GPT-2 differs from its predecessor. Try the paper in the event you’re within the associated issues.) Subsequent, the aforementioned masks is utilized, resultant scores are normalized, and dropout regularization is used to encourage sparsity.

Lastly, the computed consideration must be handed on to the following layer. That is the place the worth vectors are available – these members of this trinity that we haven’t but seen in motion.

y <- att$matmul(v) # (B, nh, T, T) x (B, nh, T, hs) -> (B, nh, T, hs)
y <- y$transpose(2, 3)$contiguous()$view(c(b, t, c)) # re-assemble all head outputs aspect by aspect

# output projection
y <- self$resid_dropout(self$c_proj(y))
y

Concretely, what the matrix multiplication does right here is weight the worth vectors by the consideration, and add them up. This occurs for all consideration heads on the similar time, and actually represents the result of the algorithm as an entire.

Remaining steps then restore the unique enter dimension. This includes aligning the outcomes for all heads one after the opposite, after which, making use of the linear layer c_proj to verify these outcomes are usually not handled equally and/or independently, however mixed in a helpful manner. Thus, the projection operation hinted at right here actually is a made up of a mechanical step (view()) and an “clever” one (transformation by c_proj()).

Transformer block up shut: Feed-forward community (MLP)

In comparison with the primary, the eye module, there actually will not be a lot to say in regards to the second core part of the transformer block (nn_gpt2_mlp()). It truly is “simply” an MLP – no “tips” concerned. Two issues deserve stating, although.

First, you will have heard in regards to the MLP in a transformer block working “position-wise,” and puzzled what is supposed by this. Take into account what occurs in such a block:

x <- x + self$attn(self$ln_1(x))
x + self$mlp(self$ln_2(x))

The MLP receives its enter (virtually) straight from the eye module. However that, as we noticed, was returning tensors of dimension [batch size, sequence length, embedding dimension]. Contained in the MLP – cf. its ahead() – the variety of dimensions by no means adjustments:

x |>
  self$c_fc() |>       # nn_linear(n_embd, 4 * n_embd)
  self$act() |>        # nn_gelu(approximate = "tanh")
  self$c_proj() |>     # nn_linear(4 * n_embd, n_embd)
  self$dropout()       # nn_dropout(pdrop)

Thus, these transformations are utilized to all components within the sequence, independently.

Second, since that is the one place the place it seems, a be aware on the activation perform employed. GeLU stands for “Gaussian Error Linear Items,” proposed in (Hendrycks and Gimpel 2020). The thought right here is to mix ReLU-like activation results with regularization/stochasticity. In idea, every intermediate computation could be weighted by its place within the (Gaussian) cumulative distribution perform – successfully, by how a lot greater (smaller) it’s than the others. In follow, as you see from the module’s instantiation, an approximation is used.

And that’s it for GPT-2’s principal actor, the repeated transformer block. Stay two issues: what occurs earlier than, and what occurs thereafter.

From phrases to codes: Token and place embeddings

Admittedly, in the event you tokenize the enter dataset as required (utilizing the matching tokenizer from Hugging Face – see under), you don’t actually find yourself with phrases. However nonetheless, the well-established truth holds: Some change of illustration has to occur if the mannequin is to efficiently extract linguistic information. Like many Transformer-based fashions, the GPT household encodes tokens in two methods. For one, as phrase embeddings. Trying again to nn_gpt2_model(), the top-level module we began this walk-through with, we see:

wte = nn_embedding(vocab_size, n_embd)

That is helpful already, however the illustration house that outcomes doesn’t embrace details about semantic relations which will fluctuate with place within the sequence – syntactic guidelines, for instance, or phrase pragmatics. The second kind of encoding cures this. Known as “place embedding,” it seems in nn_gpt2_model() like so:

wpe = nn_embedding(max_pos, n_embd)

One other embedding layer? Sure, although this one embeds not tokens, however a pre-specified variety of legitimate positions (starting from 1 to 1024, in GPT’s case). In different phrases, the community is meant to be taught what place in a sequence entails. That is an space the place completely different fashions might fluctuate vastly. The unique Transformer employed a type of sinusoidal encoding; a newer refinement is present in, e.g., GPT-NeoX (Su et al. 2021).

As soon as each encodings can be found, they’re straightforwardly added (see nn_gpt2_model()$ahead()):

tok_emb <- self$transformer$wte(x) 
pos <- torch_arange(1, x$dimension(2))$to(dtype = "lengthy")$unsqueeze(1) 
pos_emb <- self$transformer$wpe(pos)
x <- self$transformer$drop(tok_emb + pos_emb)

The resultant tensor is then handed to the chain of transformer blocks.

Output

As soon as the transformer blocks have been utilized, the final mapping is taken care of by lm_head:

x <- self$lm_head(x) # nn_linear(n_embd, vocab_size, bias = FALSE)

It is a linear transformation that maps inner representations again to discrete vocabulary indices, assigning a rating to each index. That being the mannequin’s closing motion, it’s left to the pattern era course of is to determine what to make of those scores. Or, put in a different way, that course of is free to decide on amongst completely different established strategies. We’ll see one – fairly normal – manner within the subsequent part.

This concludes mannequin walk-through. I’ve ignored a number of particulars (reminiscent of weight initialization); seek the advice of gpt.R in the event you’re .

Finish-to-end-usage, utilizing pre-trained weights

It’s unlikely that many customers will need to practice GPT-2 from scratch. Let’s see, thus, how we are able to rapidly set this up for pattern era.

Create mannequin, load weights, get tokenizer

The Hugging Face model hub permits you to entry (and obtain) all required information (weights and tokenizer) straight from the GPT-2 page. All information are versioned; we use the newest model.

 identifier <- "gpt2"
 revision <- "e7da7f2"
 # instantiate mannequin and cargo Hugging Face weights
 mannequin <- gpt2_from_pretrained(identifier, revision)
 # load matching tokenizer
 tok <- tok::tokenizer$from_pretrained(identifier)
 mannequin$eval()

tokenize

Decoder-only transformer-type fashions don’t want a immediate. However normally, purposes will need to go enter to the era course of. Because of tok, tokenizing that enter couldn’t be extra handy:

idx <- torch_tensor(
  tok$encode(
    paste(
      "No responsibility is imposed on the wealthy, rights of the poor is a hole phrase...)",
      "Sufficient languishing in custody. Equality"
    )
  )$
    ids
)$
  view(c(1, -1))
idx

torch_tensor
Columns 1 to 11  2949   7077    318  10893    319    262   5527     11   2489    286    262

Columns 12 to 22  3595    318    257  20596   9546   2644  31779   2786   3929    287  10804

Columns 23 to 24    13  31428
[ CPULongType{1,24} ]

Generate samples

Pattern era is an iterative course of, the mannequin’s final prediction getting appended to the – rising – immediate.

prompt_length <- idx$dimension(-1)

for (i in 1:30) { # determine on maximal size of output sequence
  # receive subsequent prediction (uncooked rating)
  with_no_grad({
    logits <- mannequin(idx + 1L)
  })
  last_logits <- logits[, -1, ]
  # decide highest scores (what number of is as much as you)
  c(prob, ind) %<-% last_logits$topk(50)
  last_logits <- torch_full_like(last_logits, -Inf)$scatter_(-1, ind, prob)
  # convert to chances
  probs <- nnf_softmax(last_logits, dim = -1)
  # probabilistic sampling
  id_next <- torch_multinomial(probs, num_samples = 1) - 1L
  # cease if finish of sequence predicted
  if (id_next$merchandise() == 0) {
    break
  }
  # append prediction to immediate
  idx <- torch_cat(list(idx, id_next), dim = 2)
}

To see the output, simply use tok$decode():

[1] "No responsibility is imposed on the wealthy, rights of the poor is a hole phrase...
     Sufficient languishing in custody. Equality is over"

To experiment with textual content era, simply copy the self-contained file, and check out completely different sampling-related parameters. (And prompts, in fact!)

As at all times, thanks for studying!

Photograph by Marjan
Blan on Unsplash