Implementing Luong Attention in PyTorch
I am trying to implement the attention described in Luong et al. 2015 in PyTorch myself, but I couldn't get it work. Below is my code, I am only interested in the "general" attention case for now. I wonder if I am missing any obvious error. It runs, but doesn't seem to learn.



class AttnDecoderRNN(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, hidden_size, output_size, dropout_p=0.1):
        super(AttnDecoderRNN, self).__init__()
        self.hidden_size = hidden_size
        self.output_size = output_size
        self.dropout_p = dropout_p

        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(
            num_embeddings=self.output_size,
            embedding_dim=self.hidden_size
        )
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(self.dropout_p)
        self.gru = nn.GRU(self.hidden_size, self.hidden_size)
        self.attn = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size, self.hidden_size)
        # hc: [hidden, context]
        self.Whc = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size * 2, self.hidden_size)
        # s: softmax
        self.Ws = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size, self.output_size)

    def forward(self, input, hidden, encoder_outputs):
        embedded = self.embedding(input).view(1, 1, -1)
        embedded = self.dropout(embedded)

        gru_out, hidden = self.gru(embedded, hidden)

        # [0] remove the dimension of directions x layers for now
        attn_prod = torch.mm(self.attn(hidden)[0], encoder_outputs.t())
        attn_weights = F.softmax(attn_prod, dim=1) # eq. 7/8
        context = torch.mm(attn_weights, encoder_outputs)

        # hc: [hidden: context]
        out_hc = F.tanh(self.Whc(torch.cat([hidden[0], context], dim=1)) # eq.5
        output = F.log_softmax(self.Ws(out_hc), dim=1) eq. 6

        return output, hidden, attn_weights


I have studied the attention implemented in 

https://pytorch.org/tutorials/intermediate/seq2seq_translation_tutorial.html

and 

https://github.com/spro/practical-pytorch/blob/master/seq2seq-translation/seq2seq-translation.ipynb


The first one isn't the exact attention mechanism I am looking for. A major disadvantage is that its attention depends on the sequence length (self.attn = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size * 2, self.max_length)), which could be expensive for long sequences.
The second one is more similar to what's described in the paper, but still not the same as there is not tanh. Besides, it is really slow after updating it to latest version of pytorch (ref). Also I don't know why it takes the last context (ref).


This version works, and it follows the definition of Luong Attention (general), closely. The main difference from that in the question is the separation of embedding_size and hidden_size, which appears to be important for training after experimentation. Previously, I made both of them the same size (256), which creates trouble for learning, and it seems that the network could only learn half the sequence.



class EncoderRNN(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, input_size, embedding_size, hidden_size,
                 num_layers=1, bidirectional=False, batch_size=1):
        super(EncoderRNN, self).__init__()
        self.hidden_size = hidden_size
        self.num_layers = num_layers
        self.bidirectional = bidirectional
        self.batch_size = batch_size

        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(input_size, embedding_size)

        self.gru = nn.GRU(embedding_size, hidden_size, num_layers,
                          bidirectional=bidirectional)

    def forward(self, input, hidden):
        embedded = self.embedding(input).view(1, 1, -1)
        output, hidden = self.gru(embedded, hidden)
        return output, hidden

    def initHidden(self):
        directions = 2 if self.bidirectional else 1
        return torch.zeros(
            self.num_layers * directions,
            self.batch_size,
            self.hidden_size,
            device=DEVICE
        )


class AttnDecoderRNN(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, embedding_size, hidden_size, output_size, dropout_p=0):
        super(AttnDecoderRNN, self).__init__()
        self.embedding_size = embedding_size
        self.hidden_size = hidden_size
        self.output_size = output_size
        self.dropout_p = dropout_p

        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(
            num_embeddings=output_size,
            embedding_dim=embedding_size
        )
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(self.dropout_p)
        self.gru = nn.GRU(embedding_size, hidden_size)
        self.attn = nn.Linear(hidden_size, hidden_size)
        # hc: [hidden, context]
        self.Whc = nn.Linear(hidden_size * 2, hidden_size)
        # s: softmax
        self.Ws = nn.Linear(hidden_size, output_size)

    def forward(self, input, hidden, encoder_outputs):
        embedded = self.embedding(input).view(1, 1, -1)
        embedded = self.dropout(embedded)

        gru_out, hidden = self.gru(embedded, hidden)

        attn_prod = torch.mm(self.attn(hidden)[0], encoder_outputs.t())
        attn_weights = F.softmax(attn_prod, dim=1)
        context = torch.mm(attn_weights, encoder_outputs)

        # hc: [hidden: context]
        hc = torch.cat([hidden[0], context], dim=1)
        out_hc = F.tanh(self.Whc(hc))
        output = F.log_softmax(self.Ws(out_hc), dim=1)

        return output, hidden, attn_weights

