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Translations: Chinese (Simplified), French, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Turkish
Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture referencing this post
May 25th update: New graphics (RNN animation, word embedding graph), color coding, elaborated on the final attention example.
Note: The animations below are videos. Touch or hover on them (if you’re using a mouse) to get play controls so you can pause if needed.
Sequence-to-sequence models are deep learning models that have achieved a lot of success in tasks like machine translation, text summarization, and image captioning. Google Translate started using such a model in production in late 2016. These models are explained in the two pioneering papers (Sutskever et al., 2014, Cho et al., 2014).
I found, however, that understanding the model well enough to implement it requires unraveling a series of concepts that build on top of each other. I thought that a bunch of these ideas would be more accessible if expressed visually. That’s what I aim to do in this post. You’ll need some previous understanding of deep learning to get through this post. I hope it can be a useful companion to reading the papers mentioned above (and the attention papers linked later in the post).
A sequence-to-sequence model is a model that takes a sequence of items (words, letters, features of an images…etc) and outputs another sequence of items. A trained model would work like this:
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