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Building Transformer Models with Attention

Implementing a Neural Machine Translator from Scratch in
Keras
$37 USD

If you have been around long enough, you should

notice that your search engine can understand
human language much better than in previous
years. The game changer was the attention
mechanism. It is not an easy topic to explain, and
it is sad to see someone consider that as secret
magic. If we know more about attention and
understand the problem it solves, we can decide
if it fits into our project and be more comfortable
using it.

If you are interested in natural language

processing and want to tap into the most
advanced technique in deep learning for NLP, this
new Ebook—in the friendly Machine Learning
Mastery style that you’re used to—is all you
need.

Using clear explanations and step-by-step tutorial

lessons, you will learn how attention can get the
job done and why we build transformer models to
tackle the sequence data. You will also create
your own transformer model that translates
sentences from one language to another.

About this Ebook:

Read on all devices: PDF format Ebook,

no DRM
Tons of tutorials: 23 step-by-step
lessons, 225 pages
Foundations: Start from the theoretical
background of attention mechanisms,
and it will guide you to finish a
transformer model
Hands-on: Instead of using an off-the-
shelf model, you implement every nut
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and bolt so you fully understand what

you’re doing
Working code: More than 50 Python
(.py) code files included, in addition to
the data file you need
Shows You the Detail of Attention and
Transformers.
Designed for Developers. Nothing Hidden.
Convinced?

Jump Straight to the Packages

…another NLP book?

This one is different!
Handling text and human language is a tedious job. Not only is a lot of data cleansing needed, but
multiple levels of preprocessing are also required depending on the algorithm you apply. But
unarguably, the most challenging part of all natural language processing problems is to find the
accurate meaning of words and sentences. It is because human languages are ambiguous, and the
sentence structure can be very complex.

This is not an introduction to natural language processing techniques. In fact, before you read this book,
you should know some terms on language preprocessing, such as tokenization. The goal of this book is
to introduce to you the attention mechanisms that can extract key information from a sequence and
show you how a transformer model, in which an attention mechanism is applied, is built and used.
There is only one main theme in this book: to make a machine that can translate an English sentence
into German.

Why must I know attention?

So, why must I know attention if all I want is to apply deep learning to natural language processing
tasks?

You don’t. You can just download a model from some repository and copy over the sample code. You
can finish your project without knowing why you should know attention.

However, when you find an issue in the code or discover hundreds of different models with similar
names, you will want to know what the code or the model is doing behind the scenes. Understanding
the transformer models and the attention mechanisms that power them would allow you to tell why
something works and why another doesn’t.

3 Key Ideas You Should Know About Attention

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There can be a lot to learn about attention and transformers. But there are three basic questions that
you should be able to answer.

1. What are Attention Mechanisms?

When we speak of attention, we talk about a sequence processing problem. We want to read a long
sequence as input and produce another sequence as output. Humans often find it difficult to recite a
long sentence. All writing guides suggest against using long and complex sentence structures for that
reason—readers will not comprehend it. Computers have the same difficulties too. Attention is to relate
one word in a sentence (or a token in a sequence) to another so the information or meaning they carry
can be correlated. This helps finding the context.

2. How Attention improves Recurrent Neural Networks?

Sequence processing is natural to recurrent neural networks. It is recurrent because we reuse the same
neural network for each token in a sequence. Inside the neural network, there is a state to remember
what it saw so far, but only in a condensed format. As the sequence becomes longer, it is easy to have
this state remember the recent tokens but forget about the older ones. That’s the reason we have
limited success in recurrent neural networks once the input is longer. Attention adds another layer on
top of it and helps to find the correlation between the states when the network reads different tokens in
the sequence. This is to refresh the memory at strategic times. Therefore, an RNN with attention can
handle a longer sequence.

3. What is a Transformer?
If attention can be applied to the states of a recurrent neural network, it can also be applied to the input
sequences. After all, the output of an attention mechanism is also a sequence. Therefore, we can stack
up multiple attention layers and build a neural network out of them without recurrent neural networks. It
turns out such a network can work well in many problems, and this architecture is called a transformer
model.

Introducing Our New Ebook: Building Transformer Models

with Attention
Welcome to Building Transformer Models with Attention!

This book is designed to teach machine learning practitioners like you about transformer models from
the ground up. This book is for you if you use some off-the-shelf models and see them working but feel
clueless about how attention and transformers can solve your problems.

It starts by giving you a high-level overview of what attention mechanisms are and how people use
them. You will learn from the fundamental theory and implement a transformer model line by line in
Keras. By the time you finish this book, you will have a working transformer model that can translate
English sentences into German.

This book will teach you the inner workings of a transformer model in the fastest and most effective way
we know how: to learn by doing. We give you executable code that you can run to develop the intuitions

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required and that you can copy and paste into your project to
immediately get a result. You can even reuse the code on a
different dataset to obtain a translator of your favorite languages.

Convinced?
Click to jump straight to the packages.

Who Is This Book For?

…so, is this book right for YOU?
This book is for people who know some Deep Learning and NLP.

Perhaps you have already finished our other book Deep Learning
with Python. Perhaps you finished a project with LSTM or other
recurrent neural networks. Then, the lessons in this book will guide
you to the advanced topic of attention and transformers.

The lessons in this book do assume a few things about you, such as:

You know basic Python for programming.

You can comfortably work with your IDE (such as Spyder or Visual Studio Code) or run Python on
the command line.
You know how to develop a model with TensorFlow and Keras.
You are eager to learn the nuts and bolts of transformer models.

This guide was written in the top-down and results-first style that you’re used to from Machine Learning
Mastery.

What if I Am Not Interested in Natural Language Processing?

Transformers and attention are about sequence, not only natural language processing.

Researchers have developed transformer models for computer vision. While the data are fundamentally
different, the same idea is applied. Even if you are not interested in NLP problems, you will understand
why it can work in other domains.

What if I Am Just Beginning to Learn Natural Language Processing?

Perfect. This book is written for you!

The tutorials in the book do not require sophisticated background knowledge. Following this book and
building a translator can be your first project in NLP.

What if I Have Never Used Keras Before?

You don’t need to be an expert in TensorFlow or Keras to read this book. If you still don’t feel
comfortable, we have pointers for you to learn the basics of Keras modules, either online or from
another book.

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You can benefit from this book even if you can barely code. You will know how to learn from other
people’s code. You will know how to learn from your own mistakes!

About Your Outcomes

…so what will YOU know after reading this book?
After reading and working through this book, you will know:

What is an attention mechanism

How to calculate attention mathematically
How to implement the attention mechanism into a reusable module in Keras
What is a transformer
How we build a transformer encoder and decoder using attention
How to use a transformer to get the result

You should be able to learn a new idea or two from this book to bring your NLP project to the next level.

After reading this book, you will be able to:

Explain what attention mechanisms help you

Tell how to apply a transformer to a sequence of data
Comfortably use a transformer encoder and/or decoder for your project

What Exactly Is in This Book?

This book was designed to be an advanced book on deep learning. Ideally, you are expected to feel
comfortable using a Keras API to build a model from scratch.

There is a lot to do to build a transformer model. You are not going to get lost or distracted. We aim to
take you from start to finish to develop a working transformer model that you can reuse in your other
deep learning projects. Step-by-step with laser-focused tutorials.

Each tutorial is designed to take you about one hour to read through and complete, excluding the
extensions and further reading.

You can choose to work through the lessons one per day, one per week, or at your own pace. I think
momentum is critically important, and this book is intended to be read and used, not to sit idle.

I recommend picking a schedule and sticking to it.

The tutorials are divided into five parts:

Part 1: Foundations of Attention. A high-level, minimally-technical introduction to attention.

You will know what it is about, why it works, and the variations in the implementation.
Part 2: From Recurrent Neural Networks to Transformer. Start from the traditional recurrent
neural network and see its limitations and how attention comes to the rescue. Then we show
you why once we have attention, a transformer model can replace a recurrent neural network.

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Part 3: Building a Transformer from Scratch. In multiple steps, you will create the building
blocks of a transformer model in Keras. Then you will connect the pieces to build a working
transformer with training, testing, and inference.
Part 4: Applications. There are larger transformer models available. They take a much longer
time to train and need much larger datasets, but some of them are available off the shelf. We
picked one such model and will show you how to use it to do something in only a few lines of
code.
Chapters Overview Table of Contents
Below is an overview of the 23 step-by-step The screenshot below was taken from the PDF
tutorial lessons you will work through: Ebook. It provides you with a full overview of the
table of contents from the book.
Each chapter was designed to be completed in
about 30 to 60 minutes by the average developer.

Foundations of Attention
Chapter 01: What Is Attention?
Chapter 02: A Bird’s Eye View of Research
on Attention
Chapter 03: A Tour of Attention-Based
Architectures
Chapter 04: The Bahdanau Attention
Mechanism
Chapter 05: The Luong Attention
Mechanism

From Recurrent Neural Networks to

Transformer
Chapter 06: An Introduction to Recurrent
Neural Networks
Chapter 07: Understanding Simple
Recurrent Neural Networks in Keras
Chapter 08: The Attention Mechanism from
Scratch
Chapter 09: Adding a Custom Attention
Layer to Recurrent Neural Network in Keras Building transformer models with attention table of contents
Chapter 10: The Transformer Attention
Mechanism
Chapter 11: The Transformer Model
Chapter 12: The Vision Transformer Model

Building a Transformer from Scratch

Chapter 13: Positional Encoding in
Transformer Models
Chapter 14: Transformer Positional
Encoding Layer in Keras

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Chapter 15: Implementing Scaled Dot-

Product Attention in Keras
Chapter 16: Implementing Multi-Head
Attention in Keras
Chapter 17: Implementing the Transformer
Encoder in Keras
Chapter 18: Implementing the Transformer
Decoder in Keras
Chapter 19: Joining the Transformer
Encoder and Decoder with Masking
Chapter 20: Training the Transformer Model
Chapter 21: Plotting the Training and
Validation Loss Curves for the Transformer
Model
Chapter 22: Inference with the Transformer
Model

Applications
Chapter 23: A Brief Introduction to BERT

Appendix
Appendix A: How to Setup a Workstation for
Python
Appendix C: How to Setup Amazon EC2 for
Deep Learning on GPUs

You can see that each part targets a specific

learning outcome and so does each tutorial within
each section. This acts as a filter to ensure you
are only focused on what you need to know to get
to a specific result and do not get bogged down in
unrelated objectives.

The tutorials were not designed to teach you

everything, nor to have you know everything
about each topic. They were designed to help
you understand how to get something done, how
to use a tool, and how to see the results the
fastest way I know how: to learn by doing.

Take a Sneak Peek Inside the Ebook

Click image to Enlarge.

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Download Your Sample Chapter

Do you want to take a closer look at the book? Download a free sample
chapter PDF.

Enter your email address, and your sample chapter will be sent to your inbox.

Click Here to Get My Sample Chapter

BONUS: Python Code to Do Great Things

…you also get 45 fully working Python scripts
Sample Code Recipes
Each recipe presented in the book is standalone,
meaning that you can copy and paste it into your
project and use it immediately.

You get one Python script (.py) for each

example provided in the book.

This means you can follow along and compare

your answers to a known working implementation
of each example in the provided Python files.

This helps to speed up your progress when

working through the details of a specific task,
such as:
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Generating positional encodings

Computing scaled dot-product attentions
Building a transformer encoder
Building a transformer decoder
Training a complete transformer model

Most of the provided code was developed in a

text editor and is intended to be run on the
command line. No special IDE or notebooks are
required.

All code examples were designed and tested with

Python 3.9+.

All code examples will run on modest and

modern computer hardware and were executed
on a CPU.

Python Technical Details

This section provides some technical details
about the code provided in the book.

Python Version: You can use Python 3.6 or

higher, but Python 3.9 is recommended.
Operating System: You can use Windows,
Linux, or Mac OS X.
Hardware: A standard modern workstation
will do.
Editor: You can use a text editor and run the
example from the command line.

Don’t have a Python environment?

No problem!

The appendix contains step-by-step tutorials

showing you exactly how to set up a Python
machine learning environment.

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About The Author

Hi, I'm Jason Brownlee. I run this site and I wrote and published
this book.

I live in Australia with my wife and sons. I love to read books, write
tutorials, and develop systems.

I have a computer science and software engineering background

as well as Masters and PhD degrees in Artificial Intelligence with a
focus on stochastic optimization.

I've written books on algorithms, won and ranked well in

competitions, consulted for startups, and spent years in industry.
(Yes, I have spend a long time building and maintaining REAL
operational systems!)

I get a lot of satisfaction helping developers get started and get

really good at applied machine learning.

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I teach an unconventional top-down and results-first approach to machine learning where we start by
working through tutorials and problems, then later wade into theory as we need it.

I'm here to help if you ever have any questions. I want you to be awesome at machine learning.

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