# 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.
