A depressing set

My little trek through the world of literature of the current century is slightly slowing down over the last month. The opening of a new book always bring with it some emotional investment. The last three books that I finished demanded even more than the usual: Leaving the Atocha Station by Lerner, Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro, Austerlitz by Sebald. This will be a short and sweet discussion of the last two, and is really a “feelings” and not a “literature, here’s quotes that support me” discussion.

As a side note, it’s not that Lerner’s book was bad. It felt like an author’s bildungsroman through the main character’s journey in Spain. Lerner is a poet meaning the language was actually lovely, but sometimes leaning on the everything-as-metaphor stream of consciousness which can be difficult to read. However, it’s just not as impactful as the other two.

Ishiguro’s book is set in a parallel universe where biological sciences advanced far beyond the capabilities of our current world to the point where clones are created for the sole purposes of organ harvesting. We follow one of these clones in the later years as she examines her life and relationships while attending a boarding school. Sebald’s is a fictional account of a immensely troubled man who is reflecting on his personal history as he figures out how he, a Czech Jew, arrived in Wales from Prague during the summer of 1939 as a 5 year old.

There’s a deep sense of tragedy in both of these stories which tantalized me. Neither authors actually explicitly go at length to discuss either the impending or past dooms which haunts our characters and constantly obfuscate. Ishiguro masks the truth with words like “complete” to denote the death of a clone, reminding me of Carlin’s bit on euphemisms, while Sebald’s narrator somehow always gets distracted, perhaps in a constant bid to procrastinate the discovery of the truth. They stand in contrast between the two, one of imminent death and one of the crippling past but neither fully articulating the magnitude of tragedy.

It’s almost as if we’re watching these characters swimming in the ocean with cuts and scrapes while silhouettes of sharks lurk beneath. I couldn’t look away even while knowing  what fate will befall our hopeful protagonists. In a world where so much detail is  explicitly stated for the readers, it’s actually refreshing to have things unspoken. Paired with the way both authors write, the effect is an ethereal experience.

Both also rely on the power of memory as an introspection tool, and grossly remind me of how terrible mine is (and how I should start journaling again). As our protagonists learn, they refract the past through this new prism. Sebald’s character finally understood why he suffered mental collapse at Marienbad while Ishiguro’s character, incorrectly, guessed the purposes of the “gallery”, which was a mystery until the end. This introspection all inevitably guided our characters to the future, past the last pages of the novels.

None of the two stories are complete by the end. Kathy, the clone, left her love interest before his final “donation” and got her first donation summons, while Austerlitz was still traveling to find the whereabouts of his father. If my reading of Sebald’s themes of the last few pages in Paris is correct, he will never find his father. History, especially the grotesque,  is increasingly guarded. And Kathy will not escape her fate of donations, no matter how much humanity she displays; Ishiguro’s tale is not a hero’s conquest, but more of a melancholic struggle.

Why is good literature always so sad. Onto My Brilliant Friend. That should be a happier book.

Grasshopper

The grasshopper laid on the small open air passageway between the stairs and the front door of my apartment. A streak of ardent green juxtaposed against the gray, brutalist pockmarks of the concrete walkway. And yet, I almost stepped on it. Not, on purpose mind you, but because of the very subtle pull from peripheral vision; a beckoning of sorts when one’s mind is on autopilot.

It looked like it was dead. A grasshopper is not considered an elegant insect, with its many sharp angles and rectilinear tagma. Nothing like the gentle curves of a butterfly. But with this, comes a natural orientation that I could clearly see even while erect. It was lying on its side, throwing off the alignment to the ground attained by millions of years of evolution.

But occasional twitches showed specks of life remained. Unfortunately, my hands were full carrying trash to the bin, and saving this tiny green mote involved several steps. I would had to lean my trash bag against the wall, find and gently use a piece of card stock or paper to scoop the little fellow. Finally, take this little specimen down the flights of stairs and deposit it among the shrubs.

Maybe “several steps” is overselling it, but I ultimately did nothing and continued with my chores after returning from the bins. Was it really that hard to do something for a helpless creature stuck in a foreign land? The activation energy required so large that I chose inactivity? (To be fair, it was three flights of stairs…)

Or was my laissez faire attitude the correct choice for it was too weak to survive anyways? The wind was strong that day, and I suspected that it was blown from the nearby tree onto the balcony. Perhaps the traveler was just catching its breath and would straighten up by itself after several minutes

Twenty minutes later, when I was throwing away the recycling, it was gone.

 

Piles

Living is the management of piles. Piles of laundry, piles of dishes, piles of books to read before we fade into the dirt…

Thank you NYTimes for publishing the list of your top books. It’s been awhile since I read a novel due to the pile (ahem) of New Yorker magazines on my coffee table, but it’s truly different to read a full length novel versus just a ten page short story.

Here are some notes from the past few books I finished:

  • Exit West by Hamid: frankly, I thought the novel was for YA audience. I did not like it at all. The premise, while interesting, meant that the plot could be guessed by page forty or so.
  • All the Light We Cannot See by Doerr: apparently bad Netflix adaptation, but solid novel. I really enjoyed the time jumps much like the Cloud Cuckoo Land with increasingly detailed world or anticipation, but the anti-war message is pretty heavy handed.
  • The Emperor of All Maladies by Mukherjee: marvelous writing balancing hope with despair. It’s certainly a difficult topic to read about, but I couldn’t put my Kindle down for the entire book. I do wish it would be… actually more technical… but it’s understandable the level which it is written.

Currently working through Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro and have Austerlitz arriving in a few weeks.

Slurping up SLERP

For work recently, we had to deal with functions on the surface of the sphere. While conceptually simple, this actually introduces more complexity to computations. Even something as simple as distance calculations are now different due to the curvature.

Most of these concepts are really well defined by Wikipedia or other resources. The only qualm I have with the source is the fact that there is no standardization of notation: the usage of $\theta$ and $\varphi$ are almost different and this, frankly, costed me a lot of grief.

However, the concept of shortest point interpolation (so called slerp) between two points on the sphere was really not well explained I think. There is a Scipy implementation, and a short Wikipedia article but both never really discussed the proof of why the formula

\begin{align}
S(p_0, p_1, t) = \frac{\sin((1 – t)\theta)}{\sin \theta} p_0 + \frac{\sin(t\theta)}{\sin(\theta)}p_1
\end{align}

where $\theta = \arccos(p_0 \cdot p_1)$ is actually on the sphere. I was using this for a plotting purpose, so I didn’t care about the “interpolation” aspect, but see this post for a derivation from that point of view.

Let’s quickly give detailed proofs on why this formula works, and to prove that for any $0\le t \le 1$ that we get a point on the sphere that lies on the great circle between the two points $p_0, p_1$. On a sphere of radius 1, $\theta$ is in fact the great circle distance between $p_0$ and $p_1$.

To this end, we have to show that the points defined by slerp is of norm 1, and also lies on the plane defined by the origin, and $p_0, p_1$ (definition of the great circle). This second point is easy to do, we simply have to show that $S(p_0, p_1, t) \cdot (p_0 \times p_1) = 0$ (e.g. the slerp points are orthogonal to the vector which defines the plane). This equality is true due to the simple equaliy $a \cdot (a \times b) = 0$.

Thus the slerp points lies on the plane defined by the great circle, it remains to show that the norm is actually 1. This can be done with just the sine subtraction formula and the usual Pythagorean identity. First note
\begin{align*}
\left\Vert S(p_0, p_1, t) \right\Vert^2 &= \frac{\sin^2((1-t)\theta) + \sin^2(t \theta) + 2 \sin((1-t)\theta) \sin(t\theta) \cos(\theta) } {\sin^2(\theta)}
\end{align*}
by the fact $p_0, p_1$ are norm 1.
Expanding the first term, we have
\begin{align*}
\sin^2((1-t)\theta) = \sin^2(\theta) \cos^2(t\theta) + \cos^2(\theta) \sin^2(t\theta) – 2 \sin(\theta) \cos(\theta) \sin(t\theta) \cos(t\theta).
\end{align*}
and note that the cross term can be expanded using the same sine difference formula
\begin{align*}
2 \sin((1-t)\theta) \sin(t\theta) \cos(\theta) &= 2 \sin(\theta)\cos(\theta)\sin(t\theta)\cos(t\theta) – 2 \cos^2(\theta) \sin^2(t\theta).
\end{align*}
Thus, cancelling the common terms, we have that the numerator is equal to
\begin{align*}
\sin^2(\theta) \cos^2(t\theta) + \cos^2(\theta) \sin^2(t\theta) + \sin^2(t \theta)- 2 \cos^2(\theta) \sin^2(\theta) = \\
\sin^2(\theta) \cos^2(t\theta) + (\cos^2(\theta) +1- 2 \cos^2(\theta)) \sin^2(t\theta) = \\
\sin^2(\theta) \cos^2(t\theta) + (\sin^2(\theta)) \sin^2(t\theta) = \sin^2(\theta)
\end{align*}
which equals the denominator.

My (Not-So-Successful) Quest to Conquer the NYT Connections Game with Word2Vec

The New York Times’ Connections game: a fairly simple puzzle that has been rising in popularity. The objective? Find four groups for four within a larger sample of sixteen total words such that each subgroup has an overarching theme.

I thought this would be fairly easy to solve with some simple usage of word embedding and K-means clustering. After all, if it can figure out king – man + woman = queen, then surely it can figure out that these are all sandwich ingredients. There are enough models out there for topic modelling that it was easy to install a model in under 1 minute, and I just used a simple K-means.

However, I quickly ran into problems. The most major is the fact that K-means doesn’t always give four groups of four. Seeing as this was the case, I switched to a constrained K-means algorithm. Another thing I noticed is that the word embedding probably doesn’t account for the fact that repetition might be used (e.g. ‘tom tom’ rather than ‘tom’).

It’s curious to wonder what a better approach would be, as spending some 2 hours on this little question has proved to be not as fruitful, even for some relatively simple puzzles. Maybe a contextual embedding is needed, rather than just a GLOVE word2vec model.

I also thought a more curated, greedy algorithm might work rather than K-means. Take the two most similar words, and assume they must be a group. Average the two word vectors then find the next word from the now reduced list. I gave this a whack, but also didn’t turn out too well…

… maybe this is a more difficult puzzle than I originally thought.

Nevertheless, below is some sample code:

 

import gensim.downloader
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity
from k_means_constrained import KMeansConstrained

words = [
    'plastic', 'foil', 'cellophane', 'lumber',
    'organism', 'harpoon', 'trudge', 'limber',
    'stomp', 'elastic', 'glove', 'bassinet',
    'mask', 'plod', 'jacket', 'supple'
]

# Load model
model = gensim.downloader.load('glove-wiki-gigaword-300')

# Generate similarity matrix
word_vectors = [
    model[word] for word in words # We assume all words exist in corpus
]
sim_matrix = cosine_similarity(word_vectors)

clf = KMeansConstrained(n_clusters=4, size_min=4, size_max=4, random_state=0)
clf.fit_predict(sim_matrix)

print([x for _, x in sorted(zip(clf.labels_, words))])
print(sorted(clf.labels_))

Tapping Out

I’m a fan of well-designed objects. One where its clear that an engineer spent some late nights thinking about the utility. They consciously insert themselves into the consumer who just want an intuitive experience paired alongside the promised functionality.

Things like the OXO measuring jug, where the lines are placed so that the baker doesn’t have to bend over. Or maybe just a door whose design clearly proclaims whether it should be pulled or pushed. A paperclip even passes this criteria.

The inverse is also true. Sometimes the pursuit for trends or profits causes a product to be utterly disgusting to use, causing pain (well, more so emotional damage). Even worse is when these products are procured by other businesses or the government, and just squirts soap or blows hot air when you want water….

In other words, I hate those stupid new faucets with soap dispenser/dryer that look alike. Shitty things like

or this…

or this…

especially this…

like who thought this was good… a three in one?

KISS.

Title Generator

The point of this post is pretty straightforward: apply an encoder-decoder Transformer model to yet another text generation task. The problem at hand is to generate a title given the abstract of a scientific paper.

I’m trying to figure out how to have Jupyter notebooks on WordPress; the export to HTML seems fine, but it’s hard to run. This notebook can be downloaded from here.

Load and process data

We will use the Arxiv dataset which consists of 1.7 million articles with parsed information. The dataset is quite large at over 3GB, and we’ll be only interested in using a small subset. Thus, we first process this by only parsing out a set number of articles’ title and abstract which are from a specific scientific field.

We use read_json from pandas to process the data file, remove all other columns and create a single DataFrame after removing leading/trailing white space and newline characters.

In [1]:
# Pytorch
import torch
from torch.utils.data import Dataset, DataLoader, random_split
from torch.nn.utils.rnn import pad_sequence
from torch import nn
import torch.optim as optim

import pandas as pd
from tqdm.notebook import tqdm
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import math
import numpy as np
In [2]:
# Let's set some variables for the data processing part
TOTAL_ARTICLES = 300000
FIELD = 'astro'
In [3]:
# We read a few lines at a time; note that if `chunksize` is none, the whole thing is read to memory
chunks = pd.read_json('arxiv-metadata-oai-snapshot.json', lines=True, chunksize=2048)

astro_dfs = []
num_articles = 0
for entries in tqdm(chunks):
    # We find all articles of a certain field, and then discard the rest of the columns
    astro_dfs.append(
        entries[entries['categories'].str.contains(FIELD)].drop(
            ['id', 'submitter', 'authors', 'comments', 'journal-ref', 'doi',
            'report-no', 'categories', 'license', 'versions',
            'update_date', 'authors_parsed'], axis='columns'
        )
    )
    num_articles += len(astro_dfs[-1])

    # We stop once we have enough of a dataset
    if num_articles > TOTAL_ARTICLES:
        break
In [4]:
# Make one dataframe, and we remove the \n in the text
data_df = pd.concat(astro_dfs, ignore_index=True)
data_df = data_df.replace(r'\n',' ', regex=True)
data_df['title'] = data_df['title'].str.strip()
data_df['abstract'] = data_df['abstract'].str.strip()
In [5]:
data_df
Out[5]:
title abstract
0 The Spitzer c2d Survey of Large, Nearby, Inste… We discuss the results from the combined IRAC …
1 Spectroscopic Observations of the Intermediate… Results from spectroscopic observations of the…
2 ALMA as the ideal probe of the solar chromosphere The very nature of the solar chromosphere, its…
3 Astrophysical gyrokinetics: kinetic and fluid … We present a theoretical framework for plasma …
4 Inference on white dwarf binary systems using … We report on the analysis of selected single s…
301116 The imprint of massive black hole formation mo… The formation, merging, and accretion history …
301117 Resolving the Stellar Populations in the Circu… We investigate the stellar populations in the …
301118 UVES – VLT High Resolution Spectroscopy of GRB… We present early time, high resolution spectro…
301119 Far-Infrared detection of H2D+ toward Sgr B2 We report on the first far-IR detection of H2D…
301120 DE CVn: A bright, eclipsing red dwarf – white … Close white dwarf – red dwarf binaries must ha…

301121 rows × 2 columns

Tokenize Data

With the text in an easy to manipulate DataFrame, we have to convert the text to a numerical representation. Here, we use pre-trained tokenizers from Huggingface rather than build/train our own. Roughly speaking, a tokenizer takes a word and maps it to an integer. However, often times, modern tokenizers “understand” parts of words and would also parse out the prefix/suffix of a word too.

For simplicity, we’re only going to use 384 tokens for the abstract and 64 tokens for the title, and discard the rest. This is usually not a problem for the title (as it is quite short), but will generally truncate the abstract. However, judging from the box plot, the number of tokens seem fine. Ideally, our model would incorporate the full abstract, however the amount of compute power needed will be a lot larger due to the quadratic scaling of the transformers.

In [9]:
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "bert-base-uncased"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)

# This is fairly slow,
data_tokenized = pd.DataFrame()
data_tokenized['abstract'] = data_df['abstract'].apply(
    lambda w: torch.Tensor(tokenizer(w, truncation=True, max_length=256+128)['input_ids']).int()
)
data_tokenized['title'] = data_df['title'].apply(
    lambda w: torch.Tensor(tokenizer(w, truncation=True, max_length=64)['input_ids']).int()
)
In [13]:
plt.boxplot(data_tokenized['abstract'].str.len(), vert=False)
plt.boxplot(data_tokenized['title'].str.len(), vert=False)
plt.show()

Data Loader

With the data in a numerical form, we can start loading them into PyTorch Dataset/DataLoader objects. This will help facilitate easier training.

Here, we note that we want to generate datasets which are applicable for “teacher forcing” learning. In our case, we want to deduce a sequence $(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_{n+1})$ from $(x_0, \ldots, x_n)$. See figure (source) below. In our case the French corresponds to the abstract while the English is the title. This means that we would need to shift the titles by 1 in the collate_fn function for the DataLoader. We also take the opportunity here to perform the train/validation split.
drawing

In [14]:
class ArxivDataset(Dataset):
    def __init__(self, dataframe):
        self.df = dataframe

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.df)

    def __getitem__(self, idx):
        """
        Returns abstract, then title
        """
        return self.df.iloc[idx, 0], self.df.iloc[idx, 1]

def pad_collate(batch):
    my_abstracts, my_titles = zip(*batch)

    # Pad sequence together, with 0 added
    my_abstracts = pad_sequence(my_abstracts, batch_first=True)
    my_titles = pad_sequence(my_titles, batch_first=True)

    # For teacher training, need to shift
    titles_inp = my_titles[:, 0:-1]
    titles_lab = my_titles[:, 1:]

    return (my_abstracts, titles_inp), titles_lab
In [15]:
dataset = ArxivDataset(data_tokenized)

train_size = int(0.8 * len(dataset))
test_size = len(dataset) - train_size
train_dataset, test_dataset = random_split(dataset, [train_size, test_size])

train_dataloader = DataLoader(train_dataset, batch_size=256+64, shuffle=True, collate_fn=pad_collate)
test_dataloader = DataLoader(test_dataset, batch_size=256+64, shuffle=True, collate_fn=pad_collate)
print(len(train_dataloader), len(test_dataloader))
753 189

Transformer model

Note that this is not intended as a tutorial for how to build a transformer, and we will gloss over most details. Roughly speaking, a transformer is a sequence-to-sequence model which supplies the probability distribution of the next element. First the abstract is embedded in some latent space by the encoder, which is then use by the decoder to condition for the prediction.

It is similar to RNNs, however, the main technique for a transformer is the attention mechanism, which is implemented in PyTorch. This allows transformers, in theory, to couple far ranging words with each other rather easily as a quadratic 1-to-1 comparison is done between every element in the sequence. With this extra $n^2$ expense, comes at a benefit of it seemingly able to learn languages very well.

PyTorch in theory has a Transformer module but it is not well documented. We will perform a quick and dirty implementation here. For more details, we refer to a great tutorial here. The schematics below should serve as enough of a guideline for the code below.

In [12]:
device = torch.device('cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu')

Positional Embedding

In [4]:
class PositionalEncoding(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, d_model, max_len=5000):
        """
        Inputs
            d_model - Hidden dimensionality of the input.
            max_len - Maximum length of a sequence to expect.
        """
        super().__init__()

        # Create matrix of [SeqLen, HiddenDim] representing the positional encoding for max_len inputs
        pe = torch.zeros(max_len, d_model)
        position = torch.arange(0, max_len, dtype=torch.float).unsqueeze(1)
        div_term = torch.exp(torch.arange(0, d_model, 2).float() * (-math.log(10000.0) / d_model))
        pe[:, 0::2] = torch.sin(position * div_term)
        pe[:, 1::2] = torch.cos(position * div_term)
        pe = pe.unsqueeze(0)

        # register_buffer => Tensor which is not a parameter, but should be part of the modules state.
        # Used for tensors that need to be on the same device as the module.
        # persistent=False tells PyTorch to not add the buffer to the state dict (e.g. when we save the model)
        self.register_buffer('pe', pe, persistent=False)

    def forward(self, x):
        x = x + self.pe[:, :x.size(1)]
        return x

Encoder Block

This just consists of a multihead attention (essentially a few attentions concat-ed together), and a feed-forward NN.

In [5]:
class EncoderBlock(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, input_dim, num_heads, dim_feedforward, dropout=0.1):
        super().__init__()

        # Attention layer
        self.self_attn = nn.MultiheadAttention(
            embed_dim=input_dim,
            num_heads=num_heads, batch_first=True
        )

        # Two-layer MLP
        self.linear_net = nn.Sequential(
            nn.Linear(input_dim, dim_feedforward),
            nn.Dropout(dropout),
            nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
            nn.Linear(dim_feedforward, input_dim)
        )

        # Layers to apply in between the main layers
        self.norm1 = nn.LayerNorm(input_dim)
        self.norm2 = nn.LayerNorm(input_dim)
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)

    def forward(self, x):
        # Attention part
        attn_out, _ = self.self_attn(x, x, x)
        x = x + attn_out
        x = self.norm1(x)

        # MLP part
        linear_out = self.linear_net(x)
        x = x + self.dropout(linear_out)
        x = self.norm2(x)

        return x

class EncoderLayers(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, num_layers, **encoder_args):
        super().__init__()
        self.layers = nn.ModuleList([EncoderBlock(**encoder_args) for _ in range(num_layers)])

    def forward(self, x):
        for l in self.layers:
            x = l(x)
        return x

Decoder

A decoder layer consists of a causal attention, cross-attention from the decoder, and a final MLP.

In [6]:
# From PyTorch source
def _generate_square_subsequent_mask(
        sz: int,
        dtype: torch.dtype = torch.get_default_dtype(),
):
    r"""Generate a square causal mask for the sequence. The masked positions are filled with float('-inf').
        Unmasked positions are filled with float(0.0).
    """
    return torch.triu(
        torch.full((sz, sz), float('-inf'), dtype=dtype, device=device),
        diagonal=1,
    )


class DecoderBlock(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, input_dim, num_heads, dim_feedforward, dropout=0.1):
        super().__init__()

        # Attention layers
        self.causal_self_attn = nn.MultiheadAttention(
            embed_dim=input_dim,
            num_heads=num_heads, dropout=dropout, batch_first=True
        )
        self.cross_attn = nn.MultiheadAttention(
            embed_dim=input_dim,
            num_heads=num_heads, dropout=dropout, batch_first=True,
        )

        # Two-layer MLP
        self.linear_net = nn.Sequential(
            nn.Linear(input_dim, dim_feedforward),
            nn.Dropout(dropout),
            nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
            nn.Linear(dim_feedforward, input_dim)
        )

        # Layers to apply in between the main layers
        self.norm1 = nn.LayerNorm(input_dim)
        self.norm2 = nn.LayerNorm(input_dim)
        self.norm3 = nn.LayerNorm(input_dim)
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)

    def forward(self, x, context):
        # Causal; create mask
        mask = _generate_square_subsequent_mask(x.shape[1])
        attn_out, _ = self.causal_self_attn(
            x, x, x, attn_mask=mask, is_causal=True
        )
        x = x + attn_out
        x = self.norm1(x)

        # Cross attention
        attn_out, _ = self.cross_attn(
            x, context, context,
        )
        x = x + attn_out
        x = self.norm2(x)

        # MLP
        linear_out = self.linear_net(x)
        x = x + self.dropout(linear_out)
        x = self.norm3(x)

        return x

class DecoderLayers(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, num_layers, **decoder_args):
        super().__init__()
        self.layers = nn.ModuleList([DecoderBlock(**decoder_args) for _ in range(num_layers)])
    def forward(self, title, abstract):
        for l in self.layers:
            title = l(x=title, context=abstract)
        return title

Full Model

The transformer full model is simply the above two blocks, alongside some embeddings and a final classifier layer.

In [7]:
class Transformer(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, num_layers, model_dim, num_heads, dff,
               vocab_size, dropout=0.2):
        super().__init__()

        # Needed for scaling
        self.model_dim = model_dim

        # Embedding
        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(
            num_embeddings=vocab_size, embedding_dim=model_dim
        )

        # Positional
        self.positional_encoding = PositionalEncoding(d_model=model_dim)

        self.encoder = EncoderLayers(
            num_layers=num_layers, input_dim=model_dim, num_heads=num_heads, dim_feedforward=dff, dropout=dropout
        )
        self.decoder = DecoderLayers(
            num_layers=num_layers, input_dim=model_dim, num_heads=num_heads, dim_feedforward=dff, dropout=dropout
        )

        # Final layer which maps to "probabilities" in the token space
        self.ff = nn.Linear(model_dim, vocab_size)

    def forward(self, title, abstract):
        # Apply embedding and position
        title       = self.embedding(title) * math.sqrt(self.model_dim)
        abstract    = self.embedding(abstract) * math.sqrt(self.model_dim)

        # Add positional
        title       = self.positional_encoding(title)
        abstract    = self.positional_encoding(abstract)

        # Apply encoder than decoder
        abstract    = self.encoder(abstract)
        title       = self.decoder(title, abstract)

        return self.ff(title)

Training

There are heuristics for training transformers; one of them is that a warmup should be used. We use the cosine warmup as detailed in the tutorial linked above. Another small caveat is that for the cross entropy loss, to ignore the index 0 (where padding occurred), as we don’t want the optimizer to optimize over dummy data.

Besides the two notes above, the below should be fairly similar to the usual training procedure.

In [22]:
class CosineWarmupScheduler(optim.lr_scheduler._LRScheduler):

    def __init__(self, optimizer, warmup, max_iters):
        self.warmup = warmup
        self.max_num_iters = max_iters
        super().__init__(optimizer)

    def get_lr(self):
        lr_factor = self.get_lr_factor(epoch=self.last_epoch)
        return [base_lr * lr_factor for base_lr in self.base_lrs]

    def get_lr_factor(self, epoch):
        lr_factor = 0.5 * (1 + np.cos(np.pi * epoch / self.max_num_iters))
        if epoch <= self.warmup:
            lr_factor *= epoch * 1.0 / self.warmup
        return lr_factor
In [33]:
def train(dataloader, my_model, my_criterion, my_optimizer, my_scheduler, my_epoch, interval=500):
    """
    Training loop for one epoch
    """
    losses = []
    model.train()
    for batch_idx, ((abstract, title_inp), title_lab) in enumerate(dataloader):
        # Move to GPU
        abstract = abstract.to(device)
        title_inp = title_inp.to(device)
        title_lab = title_lab.type(torch.long)
        title_lab = title_lab.to(device)

        pred = my_model(title_inp, abstract)
        loss = my_criterion(
            pred.reshape(-1, MAX_VOCAB), title_lab.reshape(-1)
        )

        my_optimizer.zero_grad()
        loss.backward()
        torch.nn.utils.clip_grad_norm_(my_model.parameters(), 5)
        my_optimizer.step()
        my_scheduler.step()

        losses.append(loss.item())

        if batch_idx print(f'Epoch {my_epoch} |  {batch_idx / len(dataloader) * 100:.1f}return losses

def test(dataloader, my_model, my_criterion, my_epoch):
    """
    Training loop for one epoch
    """
    val_loss = 0
    val_acc = 0
    val_total = 0
    model.eval()
    with torch.no_grad():
        for _, ((abstract, title_inp), title_lab) in enumerate(dataloader):
            # Move to GPU
            abstract = abstract.to(device)
            title_inp = title_inp.to(device)
            title_lab = title_lab.type(torch.long)
            title_lab = title_lab.to(device)
            title_lab = title_lab.reshape(-1)

            pred = my_model(title_inp, abstract)
            pred = pred.reshape(-1, MAX_VOCAB)
            loss = my_criterion(
                pred, title_lab
            )

            val_loss += loss.item()

            # Count number of correct predictions
            pred = torch.argmax(pred, dim=1, keepdim=True)
            title_lab = title_lab.reshape_as(pred)
            val_acc += torch.count_nonzero(pred.eq(title_lab) * (title_lab != 0)).item()
            val_total += torch.count_nonzero(title_lab).item()

    val_loss /= len(dataloader)
    val_acc /= val_total

    print(f'Epoch {my_epoch} | Validation Loss: {val_loss:.2f} | Validation Accuracy: {val_acc * 100:.1f}return val_loss, val_acc
In [34]:
epochs = 40
lr = 5e-5
MAX_VOCAB = len(tokenizer)

model = Transformer(num_layers=6, model_dim=256, num_heads=8, dff=2056, vocab_size=MAX_VOCAB).to(device)

print(f'Using {device}')

optimizer = optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=lr)
scheduler = CosineWarmupScheduler(optimizer, 5000, MAX_VOCAB * epochs)
criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss(ignore_index=0)

train_loss = []
val_loss = []
val_acc = []
model.train()
for epoch in range(1, epochs + 1):
    e_loss = train(train_dataloader, model, criterion, optimizer, scheduler, epoch, interval=100)
    train_loss += e_loss
    v_loss, v_acc = test(test_dataloader, model, criterion, epoch)

    val_loss.append(v_loss)
    val_acc.append(v_acc)
Using cuda
Epoch 1 |  0.0%  0/753 | Loss 1.05e+01
Epoch 1 |  13.3%  100/753 | Loss 1.02e+01
Epoch 1 |  26.6%  200/753 | Loss 9.72e+00
Epoch 1 |  39.8%  300/753 | Loss 9.49e+00
Epoch 1 |  53.1%  400/753 | Loss 9.34e+00
Epoch 1 |  66.4%  500/753 | Loss 9.15e+00
...
Epoch 40 |  39.8%  300/753 | Loss 2.21e+00
Epoch 40 |  53.1%  400/753 | Loss 2.20e+00
Epoch 40 |  66.4%  500/753 | Loss 2.22e+00
Epoch 40 |  79.7%  600/753 | Loss 2.18e+00
Epoch 40 |  93.0%  700/753 | Loss 2.24e+00
Epoch 40 | Validation Loss: 2.61 | Validation Accuracy: 48.9%
In [35]:
# Save model
state_dict = model.state_dict()
torch.save(state_dict, "large_model_v2.pt")

# Plot loss and stuff
fig, ax1 = plt.subplots()

ax1.plot(train_loss)
ax1.set_xlabel('Batch num')
ax1.set_ylabel('X-entropy Loss')
ax1.plot(np.arange(1, len(val_loss) + 1) * len(train_dataloader) ,val_loss)
ax1.plot([], [], 'r', label = 'temp') # Just for legends; hack

ax2 = ax1.twinx()
ax2.set_ylabel('Validation Accuracy')
ax2.plot(np.arange(1, len(val_loss) + 1) * len(train_dataloader),
         np.array(val_acc) * 100, 'r')
fig.tight_layout()
ax1.legend(['Train loss', 'Test loss', 'Test acc'])
plt.savefig('loss_good.png')

plt.show()

Inference

The above training does take awhile on an A100, and it’s not even the best results. With additional tweaking and modifications, we can probably do a lot better. In addition, we should probably look at a more specific field rather than “astro” as a whole. However, let’s move on to writing the inference.

To build a generator is easy: we start with $(x_0)$ where $x_0$ is the start token and repeatedly query the model conditioned on the abstract input. For example, the first token will be given by $x_0 \to x_1$, which we then pass in $(x_0, x_1) \to (x_1, x_2)$ and iterate. We stop once we encounter a stop token or if it reaches the number of max tokens.

In [15]:
# Reimport so I can load the model in a future date
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "bert-base-uncased"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)

MAX_VOCAB = len(tokenizer)
model = Transformer(num_layers=6, model_dim=256, num_heads=8, dff=2056, vocab_size=MAX_VOCAB).to(device)
model.load_state_dict(torch.load( "large_model_v2.pt"))
model.eval()
print('Loaded model')
Loaded model
In [16]:
class TitleGenerator(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, transformer_model: nn.Module, my_tokenizer):
        super().__init__()

        self.model = transformer_model
        self.tokenizer = my_tokenizer

    def forward(self, x: str):
        """
        Given an abstract, it should query the transformer

        :param x: Should be the abstract
        :return:
        """
        # Get tokenized
        tokenized = self.tokenizer(x, return_tensors='pt')['input_ids']
        tokenized = tokenized.to(device)
        output = torch.tensor([[101]]).to(device)
        self.model.eval()
        with torch.no_grad():
            for i in range(128):
                probs = self.model(output, tokenized)
                pred = probs.argmax(dim=2)
                output = torch.cat((output, pred[0, -1].view(1, 1)), dim=1)
                if output[0, -1] == 102:
                    break

        return self.tokenizer.decode(output[0])
In [17]:
generate = TitleGenerator(model, tokenizer)
generate('We discuss the combined IRAC/MIPS c2d Spitzer Legacy observations of the Serpens star-forming region. We describe criteria for isolating bona fide YSOs from the extensive background of extragalactic objects.')
Out[17]:
'[CLS] extragalactic star - forming regions from spitzer irac observations of the irac - irac region [SEP]'
In [18]:
generate('We explore the reach of analytical models at one-loop in Perturbation Theory (PT) to accurately describe measurements of the galaxy power spectrum from numerical simulations in redshift space. We consider the validity range in terms of three different diagnostics: 1) the goodness of fit; 2) a figure-of-bias quantifying the error in recovering the fiducial value of a cosmological parameter; 3) an internal consistency check of the theoretical model quantifying the running of the model parameters with the scale cut.')
Out[18]:
'[CLS] the effect of loop corrections on the power spectrum of galaxy power spectra in the large - scale structure of the universe [SEP]'
In [20]:
generate('There has been a discussion for many years on whether the disc in the Milky Way extends down to low metallicity. We aim to address the question by employing a large sample of giant stars with radial velocities and homogeneous metallicities based on the Gaia DR3 XP spectra. We study the 3D velocity distribution of stars in various metallicity ranges, including the very-metal poor regime (VMP, [M/H] <−2.0). We find that a clear disc population starts to emerge only around [M/H] ∼−1.3, and is not visible for [M/H] <−1.6. Using Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM), we show that there are two halo populations in the VMP regime: one stationary and one with a net prograde rotation of ∼80km/s. In this low-metallicity range, we are able to place constraints on the contribution of a rotation-supported disc sub-population to a maximum of ∼3%. We compare our results to previous claims of discy VMP stars in both observations and simulations and find that having a prograde halo component could explain most of these. ')
Out[20]:
'[CLS] the metallicity distribution of the milky way disc with gaia dr3 [SEP]'

A Terrible Philosophy

You are standing next to a lever that controls a runaway trolley. The trolley is headed straight for five people who are tied to the track. You can pull the lever to divert the trolley onto a different track, but there is one person tied to that track. Do you pull the lever?

You decide to pull the lever. Unfortunately, due to lack of infrastructure upkeep, the lever malfunctions and snaps off and you witness the brutal massacre of five innocent workers. It’s a good thing they were unionized and their widows are now receiving proper indemnity benefits.

A runaway trolley is headed towards five people who are tied to the track. There is no lever that you can pull to divert the trolley, but there is a large person standing next to you. The only way to stop the trolley and save the five people is to push the large person off the bridge and onto the track.

You try to push the person off the track. But you, a scrawny philosophy student who subsists on a diet of ramen and Cheetos, lack the power to push the large person off. As retaliation, the large person shoves you instead, and your last thought before you are crushed is about Camus.

You are a surgeon performing an operation on a patient. Suddenly, five other patients rush into the operating room. They have all been involved in a car accident and are in critical condition. You can only operate on one patient, and you know that the other five patients will die if you don’t operate on them.

After asking the RN to find insurance cards in their wallets and realizing that the five new patients are most likely on high deductible plans, you decide to simply operate on the original patient. After all, he has that new BCBS plan that will finally help you make a dent in that ridiculous $100,000 student loan. So much for the Hippocratic oath.

You are a self-driving car engineer. You are working on a new algorithm that will prevent self-driving cars from hitting people. However, you know that the algorithm is not perfect, and there is a small chance that it will cause the car to swerve into oncoming traffic and kill the people in the car. Do you release the algorithm?

Your boss is Elon Musk. Of course you do/did and was/will be the cause of a major pile up on I-75 one of these days.

Shared Experiences

The clue read

3 letters, 39 Across: Tamagotchis are digital ones

celerius: wait you don't know this noah? 
noahsfart: uhhhh no I don't
celerius: did you not have one like in early 2000s? everyone had one 
noahsfart: dude, I just never did. guess I faintly 
    remember classmates having one???
noahsfart: idk I was just playing too much maplestory lol

Noah started doing the crossword on Discord with his friends during lock down  as a way to feel connected. However, he didn’t expect a game, out of all things, to cause a moment of self-reflection.

“Why didn’t I know what Tamagotchis are? Oh god, what are other toys that I didn’t play with? … did I have a bad childhood? Oh my god, think of all the cultural phenomenon that I never will know! My friends already think I’m weird because I never watched Teen Titans…”

He didn’t have a terrible childhood. After all, it’s just a matter of circumstances that he couldn’t control that he never got to take care of a digital pet. The fleeting panic passed by the second the group moved to the next clue:

4 letters, 44 Down: Cubs slugger

snickerpunch: isn't slugger a baseball term? is must be AROD
noahsfart: it's not AROD, it's definitely SOSA. AROD never 
    played for the cubs.
celerius: how do you know this baseball stuff???
noahsfart: ... how do you know about Tamaguccis
noahsfart: I mean i did play little league for 5 years.
snickerpunch: lmao guccis