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design/sequence decoder #4905

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merged 14 commits into from
Nov 9, 2017

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Superjomn
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An LoD-based Sequence Decoder (Beam Search)

refactor the beamSearch in RecurrentGradientMachine

## Beam Search
Beam search is a heuristic search algorithm that explores a graph by expanding the most promising node in a limited set.

It is the core component of Sequence Decoder.
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Sequence Decoder => *sequence decoder*


It is the core component of Sequence Decoder.

In the original implementation of `RecurrentGradientMachine`, the beam search is a method in RNN,
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Are there more than one implementations of RecrurentGradientMachine? What is the other implementations besides the "original" one?

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# A LoD-based Sequence Decoder
In tasks such as machine translation and image to text,
a **sequence decoder** is necessary to generate sequences.
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a [sequence decoder](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/book/blob/develop/08.machine_translation/README.md) is necessary

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# A LoD-based Sequence Decoder
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Design: Sequence Decoder Generating LoDTensors

For example, the RNN sates, candidates IDs and probabilities of beam search can be represented as `LoDTensors`;
the selected candidate's IDs in each time step can be stored in a `TensorArray`, and `Packed` to the sentences translated.

## Changing LoD's absolute offset to relative offsets
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This is not part of the design. This is an issue. I copy-n-pasted the content into issue #4945

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some simple comments first.

```

the first level represents that there are two sequences,
their offsets in the second-level LoD is `[0, 3)` and `[3, 5)`.
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Is here [3, 5) or [3, 6), I think it is the latter one.

the first level represents that there are two sequences,
their offsets in the second-level LoD is `[0, 3)` and `[3, 5)`.

The second level is the same with the relative offset example because the lower level is a tensor.
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the same as or the same to?

# for example
# decoder_mem.lod is
# [[0 1 3],
# [0 1 3 6]]
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Why is decoder_mem here a sequence? Usually, the memory of an RNN is its hidden state in the last time step. Is memory here a TensorArray? and we decide to memorize hidden states in all the previous time step? If so, is this design compatible to the memory in dynamic RNN?

But I guess, maybe this memory has something different?

# its tensor content is [a1 a2 a3 a4 a5]
# which means there are 2 sentences to translate
# - the first sentence has 1 translation prefixes, the offsets are [0, 1)
# - the second sentence has 2 translation prefixes, the offsets are [1, 3) and [3, 6)
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Does here means memory need to memorize the entire unfinished prefixes? (This is required for beam search.)

# the following has 2, 3, 2, 3 candidates
# the encoder_ctx_expanded's content will be
# [a1 a1 a2 a2 a3 a3 a3 a4 a4 a5 a5 a5]
encoder_ctx_expanded = pd.lod_expand(encoder_ctx, target_word)
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The name target word is confusing. In the generation, we do not have target word.

# which means there are 2 sentences to translate
# - the first sentence has 1 translation prefixes, the offsets are [0, 1)
# - the second sentence has 2 translation prefixes, the offsets are [1, 3) and [3, 6)
# the target_word.lod is
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The name target word for generation is really confusing. For the generation, we only have source words to be translated into target words.

bias=None,
act=pd.activation.Softmax())
# topk_scores, a tensor, [None, k]
topk_scores, topk_ids = pd.top_k(scores)
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This top_k is special. It is not only a simple "selecting top k items", but also "selecting the top k from a distribution to form a new batch". How do we handle this?

# selected_ids is the selected candidates that will be append to the translation
# selected_scores is the scores of the selected candidates
# generated_scores is the score of the translations(with candidates appended)
selected_ids, selected_scores, generated_scores = decoder.beam_search(
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First, I want to leave some of my questions here for our discussion.

The difficulties for dynamic beam search through some preliminary operators lies in (maybe not limited to):

  1. how to loop.
    • maybe this is done by dynamic RNN currently, but the loop is a generally used operation, should it be independent of RNN?
  2. how to stop the loop (the condition operation?).
    • Samples in a batch may hit different conditions, as a result, the batch size is dynamically changing.
    • Maybe all branches of a condition will be executed? I am not sure what is the design of the current condition operator, and do we decide to use it in beam search?
  3. How to construct the beam?
    • Dynamic expansion to form a larger batch but have to track the entire unfinished prefixes.
    • How the track the unfinished prefixes, and who to track this? It seems that in the current design the decoder memory tracks this?
  4. How to shrink the beam?

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LGTM!

@Superjomn Superjomn merged commit 53cb4df into PaddlePaddle:develop Nov 9, 2017
@Superjomn Superjomn deleted the design/sequence_decoder branch November 9, 2017 05:32
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4 participants