Use of embeddings to preserve order invariance - tensorflow

I want to recommend an item complementary to a cart of items. So, naturally, I thought of using embeddings to represent items, and I came up to a layer of this kind in keras:
item_input = Input(shape=(MAX_CART_SIZE,), name="item_id")
item_embedding = Embedding(input_dim=NB_ITEMS+1, input_length=MAX_CART_SIZE, output_dim=EMBEDDING_SIZE, mask_zero=True)
I used masking to handle the variable size of the carts. So, the dimensions of the output tensor of this layer is MAX_CART_SIZE x EMBEDDING_SIZE. It means that there are as many different embeddings as there are potential items. In other words, a item can be encoded a different way according to its position within the cart and that's an undesirable behavior... Though, it seems that most neural networks dealing with NLP data work this way, with embeddings not associated with words but with words/indices within a phrase.
So, what would be the correct way to preserve order invariance? In other words, I'd like the cart A,B,C be stricly equivalent to the carts C,B,A or B,A,C in terms of input representation and generated output.

One way of having invariance will be done by using a Transformer architecture WITHOUT using positional embeddings. In this way, each item is encoded to an embedding, and because you do not have a positional embedding, the object embedding is the same even if it is one the first position or on the last one.
Moreover, the Transformer architecture is invariant to such positions as long as you avoid the positional embedding.

Related

one_hot Vs Tokenizer for Word representation

I have seen in many blogs , people using one_hot (from tf.keras.preprocessing.text.one_hot ) to convert the string of words into array of numbers which represent indices. This does not ensure unicity. Whereas Tokenizer class ensures unicity (tf.keras.preprocessing.text.Tokenizer ).
Then why is one_hot prefered over tokenizer?
Update: I got to know that hashing is used in One_hot to convert words into numbers but didn't get its importance as we can use the tokenizer class to do the same thing with more accuracy.
Not sure what you mean by uncity. I expect it has to do with the sequential relationship between the words. That of course is lost with ine hot encoding. However one-hot encoding is used when the number of words is limited. If say you have 10 words in the vocubulary you will create 10 new features which is fine for most neural networks to process. If you have other features in your data set beside the word sequences say numeric ordinal parameters you can still create a single input model. However if you have 10,000 words in the vocabulary you would create 10,000 new features which at best will take a lot to process. So in the case of a large vocabularly it is best to use "dense" encoding" versus the sparse encoding generated by one hot encoding. You can use the results of the tokenizer encoding to serve as input to a keras embedding layer which will encode the words into an n dimensional space where N is a value you specify. If you have additional ordinal features then to process the data your model will need multiple inputs. Perhaps that is why some people prefer to one hot encode the words.

Difference between feature_column.embedding_column and keras.layers.Embedding in TensorFlow

I have been using keras.layers.Embedding for almost all of my projects. But, recently I wanted to fiddle around with tf.data and found feature_column.embedding_column.
From the documentation:
feature_column.embedding_column -
DenseColumn that converts from sparse, categorical input.
Use this when your inputs are sparse, but you want to convert them to a dense
representation (e.g., to feed to a DNN).
keras.layers.Embedding - Turns positive integers (indexes) into dense vectors of fixed size.
e.g. [[4], [20]] -> [[0.25, 0.1], [0.6, -0.2]]
This layer can only be used as the first layer in a model.
My question is, is both of the api doing similar thing on different type of input data(for ex. input - [0,1,2] for keras.layers.Embedding and its one-hot-encoded rep. [[1,0,0],[0,1,0],[0,0,1] for feature_column.embedding_column)?
After reviewing source code for both operations here is what I found:
both operations rely on tensorflow.python.ops.embedding_ops funcitonality;
keras.layers.Embedding uses dense representations and contains generic keras code for fiddling with shapes, init variables etc;
feature_column.embedding_column relies on sparse and contains functionality to cache results.
So, your guess seems to be right: these 2 are doing similar things, rely on distinct input representations, contain some logic that doesn't change the essense of what they do.

How to pass a list of numbers as a single feature to a neural network?

I am trying to cluster sentences by clustering the sentence embedding of them taken from fasttext model. Each sentence embedding has 300 dimensions, and I want to reduce them to 50 (say). I tried t-SNE, PCA, UMAP. I wanted to see how Auto Encoder works for my data.
Now passing those 300 numbers for each sentence as separate features to the NN would make sense or they should be passed as a single entity? If so, is there an way to pass a list as a feature to NN?
I tried passing the 300 numbers as individual features and with the output I tried clustering. Could get very few meaningful clusters rest were either noise or clusters with no similar sentences but being grouped (But with other techniques like UMAP I could get far more meaningful clusters in more number). Any leads would be helpful. Thanks in advance :)

Properly concatenate feature maps in Tensorflow

I am attempting to reproduce a Convolution Neural Network from a research paper using Tensorflow.
There are many times in the diagram where the results of convolutions are concatenated. Currently I am using tf.concat(https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/concat) along the last axis (representing channels) to concatenate these feature maps. I originally believed that I would want to concatenate along all axes, but this does not seem to be an option in tensorflow. Now I am facing the problem where the paper indicates that tensors(feature maps) of different sizes should be concatenated. tf.concat does not support concatenations of different sizes, so I am wondering if this was the correct command to use in the first place. In summary, what is the correct way to concatenate feature maps(sometimes of different sizes) in tensorflow?
Thank you.
It's impossible and meaningless to concatenate features maps with different sizes.
If you want to concatenate 2 tensors, every dimension except the concatenation one must be equal.
From the image you posted, in fact, you can see that every feature map that gets concatenated, has the same spatial extent (but different depth) of the other one.
If you can't concatenate in that way, probabily that's something wrong in your code, and probably the problem is the lack of padding = valid in the convolution operation.
The problem that you encounter for inception network may be resolved by using padding in convolutional layers to keep the size same. For inception blocks, instead of using "VALID" padding, change it to "SAME" one. So, without requiring any resizing, you can concatenate the outputs.
Alternatively, you can append padding to the feature maps that are going to be concatenated. You can do that by using tf.pad().
If you don't prefer to do this one, you can use tf.image.resize_images function to resize them to same values. However, this is a dirty and computationally expensive approach.
Tensors can only be concatenated along one axis. If you need to concatenate feature maps of different sizes, you must somehow manipulate the sizes of the original tensors.

How to train with inputs of variable size?

This question is rather abstract and not necessarily tied to tensorflow or keras. Say that you want to train a language model, and you want to use inputs of different sizes for your LSTMs. Particularly, I'm following this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317379370_A_Neural_Language_Model_for_Query_Auto-Completion.
The authors use, among other things, word embeddings and one-hot encoding of characters. Most likely, the dimensions of each of these inputs are different. Now, to feed that into a network, I see a few alternatives but I'm sure I'm missing something and I would like to know how it should be done.
Create a 3D tensor of shape (instances, 2, max(embeddings,characters)). That is, padding the smaller input with 0s.
Create a 3D tensor of shape (instances, embeddings+characters, 1)). That is, concatenating inputs.
It looks to me that both alternatives are bad for efficiently training the model. So, what's the best way to approach this? I see the authors use an embedding layer for this purpose, but technically, what does that mean?
EDIT
Here are more details. Let's call these inputs X (character-level input) and E (word-level input). On each character of a sequence (a text), I compute x, e and y, the label.
x: character one-hot encoding. My character index is of size 38, so this is a vector filled with 37 zeros and one 1.
e: precomputed word embedding of dimension 200. If the character is a space, I fetch the word embedding of the previous word in the sequence, Otherwise, I assign the vector for incomplete word (INC, also of size 200). Real example with the sequence "red car": r>INC, e>INC, d>INC, _>embeddings["red"], c>INC, a>INC, r>INC.
y: the label to be predicted, which is the next character, one-hot encoded. This output is of the same dimension as x because it uses the same character index. In the example above, for "r", y is the one-hot encoding of "e".
According to keras documentation, the padding idea seems to be the one. There is the masking parameter in the embedding layer, that will make keras skip these values instead of processing them. In theory, you don't lose that much performance. If the library is well built, the skipping is actually skipping extra processing.
You just need to take care not to attribute the value zero to any other character, not even spaces or unknown words.
An embedding layer is not only for masking (masking is just an option in an embedding layer).
The embedding layer transforms integer values from a word/character dictionary into actual vectors of a certain shape.
Suppose you have this dictionary:
1: hey
2: ,
3: I'm
4: here
5: not
And you form sentences like
[1,2,3,4,0] -> this is "hey, I'm here"
[1,2,3,5,4] -> this is "hey, I'm not here"
[1,2,1,2,1] -> this is "hey, hey, hey"
The embedding layer will tranform each of those integers into vectors of a certain size. This does two good things at the same time:
Transforms the words in vectors because neural networks can only handle vectors or intensities. A list of indices cannot be processed by a neural network directly, there is no logical relation between indices and words
Creates a vector that will be a "meaningful" set of features for each word.
And after training, they become "meaningful" vectors. Each element starts to represent a certain feature of the word, although that feature is obscure to humans. It's possible that an embedding be capable of detecting words that are verbs, nouns, feminine, masculine, etc, everything encoded in a combination of numeric values (presence/abscence/intensity of features).
You may also try the approach in this question, which instead of using masking, needs to separate batches by length, so each batch can be trained at a time without needing to pad them: Keras misinterprets training data shape